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Society - and the way it is organized - along with families, shapes who is available and suitable as a partner, who we encounter, what traits we seek in a partner, and who we form relationships with. In turn, our partner choices impact society at large. Given this bidirectional relationship, partner selection is expected to evolve alongside broader societal changes influenced by factors such as economic shifts, wars, migration, and sociocultural transformations like secularization, feminist movements, and sexual revolutions. The central question of this special issue is how societal transformations have influenced long-term trends in partner preferences and choices. This is being explored through new sources - online genealogies, matrimonial and contact advertisements, data from marriage agencies and dating apps – and approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the exponential growth of digitized historical materials, historians and social scientists face the daunting task of navigating vast online collections. While online archives do provide search tools to query their materials, these usually do not meet the scholars' need to trace and store all relevant materials from the online archive. This case study shows how computer vision methods, and more specifically a signal processing approach, can be used to identify, classify and extract relevant information items from a vast historical data collection. More specifically, this study reports the results of the construction of a data pipeline that extracts matrimonial advertisements from the digitized Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia. Matrimonial advertisements can provide genuine insights into the evolution of partner preferences over time, but they are hard to collect as they are scattered over millions of digitized historical newspapers and magazines. Moreover, to study variation in partner preferences by, for example, sex, social class, matrimonial status and time period, it is necessary to store the data into a database. The pipeline that we have constructed extracts matrimonial advertisements in a stepwise fashion, encompassing identification, through binarisation and segmentation, and classification based on Optical Character Recognition. By ways of a comprehensive evaluation, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the efficacy of the pipeline for the extraction of matrimonial advertisements is demonstrated. The findings not only underscore the viability of the signal processing approach but also underscore its potential for advancing research in historical demography, family history, as well as economic history, as similar pipelines can be set up to extract other relevant newspaper items, such as, marriage, birth, death and moving announcements, job vacancies or business announcements from digitized source collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (BHMD) gathers records of the more than 600,000 marriages celebrated in the Diocese of Barcelona and their taxation registered in Barcelona Cathedral's so-called Marriage Licenses Books for the long period 1451-1905 and the BALL Demographic Database brings together the individual information recorded in the population registers, censuses and fiscal censuses of the main municipalities of the county of Baix Llobregat (Barcelona). In this ongoing collection 263,786 individual observations have been assembled, dating from the period between 1828 and 1965 by December 2020. The two databases started as part of different interdisciplinary research projects at the crossroads of Historical Demography and Computer Vision. Their construction uses artificial intelligence and computer vision methods as Handwriting Recognition to reduce the time of execution. However, its current state still requires some human intervention which explains the implemented crowdsourcing and game sourcing experiences. Moreover, knowledge graph techniques have allowed the application of advanced record linkage to link the same individuals and families across time and space. Moreover, we will discuss the main research lines using both databases developed so far in historical demography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is customary to consider population censuses (and statistics in general) as exclusive to the modern State, appearing in the second half of the eighteenth century but being developed and spreading in the West during the nineteenth century. Indeed, censuses help to strengthen and legitimize such states. However, in Spain, just as in Europe and the United States, the first population censuses considered modern were the result of, on the one hand, the directives and general and provincial coordination provided by the new state statistical institutions, such as the Statistics Commission or the Institute of Geography and, on the other, municipal personnel and the previous knowledge of local conditions held by the councils and other agents, such as the clergy, intellectuals, and notables. The media were also availed of for the cause. Let us recall that the municipalities were an explicit part of the state apparatus, therefore their relevance in carrying out censuses is not an indication of failure or weakness on the part of the Spanish State regarding the process of "bottom‐up nation‐building", but rather a way to imagine the nation through which collective involvement would build the nation from the locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at studying the intergenerational transmission of status within farmers and artisans in the preindustrial area of Barcelona from a siblings' attainment perspective in a context of impartible inheritance. The data source used are the Marriage License Books from the Barcelona's Diocese compiled in the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database, which for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides a rich and continuous demographic and socioeconomic information through the use of the multilevel regression analysis. Our main findings points out the important family impact on the social fate of children. First-married children were the maximal inheritors of parental statuses in all social groups, especially for farmers and artisans, the former being more linked to ascription than the latter. However, farmers were found to be the group with the highest intergenerational occupational inheritance although artisans were who transmitted at most their social group. This divergent effect is due to the different strategies, or in a way a same strategy, used on non-first-married children to whom, families from the two social groups, when not able to transmit the same parental occupation, preferred to position the offspring in artisans' careers thanks to a favourable context of a flourishing manufacturing industry at the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We enrich KGs to take into account valid changes on attribute values. • We adapt existing entity alignment methods to record linkage tasks. • We improve existing methods on benchmark data sets. Nowadays, it is common in Historical Demography the use of individual-level data as a consequence of a predominant life-course approach for the understanding of the demographic behaviour, family transition, mobility, etc. Advanced record linkage is key since it allows increasing the data complexity and its volume to be analyzed. However, current methods are constrained to link data from the same kind of sources. Knowledge graph are flexible semantic representations, which allow to encode data variability and semantic relations in a structured manner. In this paper we propose the use of knowledge graph methods to tackle record linkage tasks. The proposed method, named WERL , takes advantage of the main knowledge graph properties and learns embedding vectors to encode census information. These embeddings are properly weighted to maximize the record linkage performance. We have evaluated this method on benchmark data sets and we have compared it to related methods with stimulating and satisfactory results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been amply demonstrated that individuals' reproductive capability is the key explanatory phenomenon for understanding onomastic disappearance during the early modern period. This article analyzes the evolution and consequences of surname extinction in a specific population: Catalonia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this article two aspects are examined. First, the observed disappearance of surnames is estimated through historical data collected in the Llibres d'Esposalles (Marriage Books) from 1481 to 1600 at Barcelona Cathedral. Second, the estimated natural extinction of those surnames registered in 1481 is forecast by applying a statistical branching process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]