Trevon Logan, The Ohio State University, ENGIE-Axium Endowed Professor, Economics
Title: Learning About Black Life Through Memorials: The Funeral Programs Project
Abstract: Historical restrictions on newspaper publication of the obituaries led Black Americans to develop a unique cultural tradition of detailed funeral programs. Today, funeral services note the prominence and importance of funeral programs specifically for Black Americans. This project seeks to use Black funeral programs to expand the dimensions of life course analysis for Black Americans. Funeral programs give an in-depth look into the lives of individuals at a level rarely seen in other data sources, allowing social scientists to move “beyond the archive” to analyze Black Americans using a new source of rich biographical and personal information for Black life course research. In addition, funeral program information can be matched to administrative data as a check on the accuracy of information known by loved ones and those recorded in other sources. This presentation describes a project to collect more than 15,000 funeral programs for Black Americans, concentrating on those from the mid- to late 20th century. I explain the process of manually collecting funeral programs and the novel information they contain to describe the new dimensions of research possible by analyzing Black funeral programs. I also describe extracting data from a large scale collection of funeral programs using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Unlike existing methods of textual analysis and record linking, this project uses different sources for algorithm training and external validity. The validation shows agreement rates well above 90% for manual and LLM/NLP models, verifying the accuracy of the large scale data collection methodology. The verification check of the similarity between the manual data and the data produced by the algorithm increases the reliability of the method to produce large-scale, novel data on Black life course, and establishes practice for future research. Preliminary empirical analysis from a sample of roughly 2,000 funeral programs shows trends over time in educational attainment, occupations, migration, hobbies, family structure, and community engagement can be uniquely identified using this novel source of information about Black life course.
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