At the request of our PI, Chris has been testing a system of mechanized searching and matching of soldiers to the census. Most people who use the census in their research use some form of mechanized linking. We've always maintained that humans are better than machines. It looks like Chris has proved us correct.
He took soldiers from our POW sample and did a mechanized search for them in the 1870 census. I will not explain it, because it doesn't matter, and I don't really understand it.
Chris searched for a subset of our soldiers. That is, he only searched for soldiers we'd already found. The mechanized search "matched" 37% of our soldiers. Unfortunately, 16% of those matches turned out to be incorrect. When we originally searched for these soldiers, we found 80% of them. Even if you just compared 37% with 80% we'd look good. But what that number really means (based on who Chris searched) is that the mechanization only found 30% of the 80%. Hope that is correct and makes sense.
What it amounts to is census inputters rock! This is one job that won't be taken over by robots.
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