Economists digitize India's district census handbooks, using AI to coordinate crowd work
paulnovosad · x · 2026-11-09
In a long thread, economist Paul Novosad describes a project to collect and publish India's District Census Handbooks from every census since 1951. The handbooks contain rich narrative slices of economic and cultural life — such as caste practices and social change, written from the perspective of the IAS officers running each district — including the case of 371 villages submerged by a reservoir where economic benefits were discussed extensively but the displaced residents barely mentioned. The team plans to use AI to coordinate contributors' parsing workflows and consolidate everyone's work into a public dataset.
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