In bautheac/podcleaner: Legacy Scottish Post Office Directories Cleaner

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

podcleaner

The Scottish Post Office directories are annual directories that provide an alphabetical list of a town’s or county’s inhabitants including their forename, surname, occupation and address(es); they provide a solid basis for researching Scotland's family, trade, and town history. A large number of these, covering most of Scotland and dating from 1773 to 1911, can be accessed in digitised form from the National Library of Scotland. podcleaner attempts to clean optical character recognition (OCR) errors in directory records after they've been parsed and saved to "csv" files using a third party tool^[See for example the python podparser library.]. The package further attempts to match records from trades and general directories. See the tests folder for examples running unexported functions.

Load

Load general and trades directory samples in memory from "csv" files:

• Globals

library(podcleaner)

directories <- c("1861-1862")

progress <- TRUE; verbose <- FALSE

• General directories

path_directories <- utils_make_path("data", "general-directories")

general_directory <- utils_load_directories_csv(
  type = "general", directories, path_directories, verbose
)

print.data.frame(general_directory)

• Trades directories

path_directories <- utils_make_path("data", "trades-directories")

trades_directory <- utils_load_directories_csv(
  type = "trades", directories, path_directories, verbose
)

print.data.frame(trades_directory)

Clean

Clean records from both datasets:

• General directories

general_directory <-
  general_clean_directory(general_directory, progress, verbose)

print.data.frame(general_directory)

• Trades directories

trades_directory <-
  trades_clean_directory(trades_directory, progress, verbose)

print.data.frame(trades_directory)

Match

Match general to trades directory records:

distance <- TRUE; matches <- TRUE

directory <- combine_match_general_to_trades(
  trades_directory, general_directory, progress, verbose, distance, matches,
  method = "osa", max_dist = 5L
)

print.data.frame(directory)

Directory records are compared and eventually matched using a distance metric calculated with the method and corresponding parameters specified in arguments. Under the hood the fuzzyjoin package and the stringdist_left_join function in particular, help with the matching operations.

Save

utils_IO_write(directory, "dev", "post-office-directory")

bautheac/podcleaner documentation built on Jan. 14, 2022, 12:44 a.m.