Making handwritten census records explorable
There's a lot of unstructured data that has been too tedious to make sense of: scanned PDFs, handwriting, weirdly designed tables, or just too much information. I spent a few hours building an app to explore the handwritten 1950 census records for Shorewood, Wisconsin. I was blown away by how much we could do with them.
My starting prompt was simple: find and use the handwritten census records to build an interactive explorer, and ask me any clarifying questions. Fable 5.2 had the wheel for most of it. I spent two or three hours following up with things like 'what other ideas do you have to visualize this?' and 'change the UX to be easier to understand.'
I could have been more specific, but it was more fun to see what it came up with. As a final bit of polish, I had it make a video of a census taker navigating a street. It made me want to try this with more data that had previously felt too tedious to explore.