Legacy Scottish Post Office Directories Cleaner.

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[1]. 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)
#>   directory page    surname forename
#> 1 1861-1862   71       ABOT      Wm.
#> 2 1861-1862   71 ABRCROMBIE     Alex
#>                                                occupation
#> 1 Wine and spirit mercht — See Advertisement in Appendix.
#> 2                                                        
#>                                                    addresses
#> 1                           1S20 Londn rd; ho. 13<J Queun sq
#> 2 Bkr; I2 Dixon Street, & 29 Auderstn Qu.; res 2G5 Argul st.

• 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)
#>   directory page rank                                              occupation
#> 1 1861-1862   71  135 Wine and spirit mercht — See Advertisement in Appendix.
#> 2 1861-1862   71  326                                                     Bkr
#> 3 1861-1862   71  586                                               Victualer
#>          type    surname forename address.trade.body address.trade.number
#> 1 OWN ACCOUNT       ABOT      Wm.          Londn rd.                 1S20
#> 2 OWN ACCOUNT ABRCROMBIE     Alex           Dixen pl                   I2
#> 3 OWN ACCOUNT       BLAI  Jon Hug           High St.                  2S0

Clean

Clean records from both datasets:

• General directories

general_directory <-
  general_clean_directory(general_directory, progress, verbose)

print.data.frame(general_directory)
#>   directory page    surname  forename               occupation
#> 1 1861-1862   71     Abbott   William Wine and spirit merchant
#> 2 1861-1862   71 Abercromby Alexander                    Baker
#> 3 1861-1862   71 Abercromby Alexander                    Baker
#>   address.trade.number address.trade.body address.house.number
#> 1               18, 20       London Road.                  136
#> 2                   12      Dixon Street.                  265
#> 3                   29    Anderston Quay.                  265
#>   address.house.body
#> 1      Queen Square.
#> 2     Argyle Street.
#> 3     Argyle Street.

• Trades directories

trades_directory <-
  trades_clean_directory(trades_directory, progress, verbose)

print.data.frame(trades_directory)
#>   directory page rank    surname  forename               occupation        type
#> 1 1861-1862   71  135     Abbott   William Wine and spirit merchant OWN ACCOUNT
#> 2 1861-1862   71  326 Abercromby Alexander                    Baker OWN ACCOUNT
#> 3 1861-1862   71  586      Blair John Hugh               Victualler OWN ACCOUNT
#>   address.trade.number address.trade.body
#> 1               18, 20       London Road.
#> 2                   12       Dixon Place.
#> 3                  280       High Street.

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 page rank    surname  forename               occupation        type
#> 1 1861-1862   71  135     Abbott   William Wine and spirit merchant OWN ACCOUNT
#> 2 1861-1862   71  326 Abercromby Alexander                    Baker OWN ACCOUNT
#> 3 1861-1862   71  586      Blair John Hugh               Victualler OWN ACCOUNT
#>   address.trade.number address.trade.body address.house.number
#> 1               18, 20       London Road.                  136
#> 2                   12       Dixon Place.                  265
#> 3                  280       High Street.                     
#>                       address.house.body distance
#> 1                          Queen Square.        0
#> 2                         Argyle Street.        5
#> 3 Failed to match with general directory       NA
#>                                     match
#> 1    Abbott William - 18, 20, London Road
#> 2 Abercromby Alexander - 12, Dixon Street
#> 3                                    <NA>

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")

1. See for example the python podparser library.