The Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN)

These tools are coding tables that transform vocabularies, for example, standardized occupational titles into HISCO or HISCO into status codes.

Historical concepts can be described using standardized vocabularies. Three steps are required for coding historical concepts:

1. standardization of titles,
2. grouping into codes
3. assigning status codes. 

There are two kinds of schemas within historical demography. IPUMS-USA, IPUMS-International, MOSAIC, and NAPP were developed to standardize census data. IDS, LINKS-gen, and PiCo are efforts to standardize historical data from other types of historical sources, such as the civil registry, militia registers, parish registers, population registers, slave registers, or tax registers. All schemas cater to a very specific public, as they have been developed for projects with strong institutional boundaries.

HSNDB is the collective name for the datasets containing Dutch individuals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with which more than 500 publications have been written on issues such as life histories, social mobility, infant mortality and longevity. Of these, the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) and LINKS are the most prominent.

SSHOC-NL is a cooperation between the HSNDB and the Central Bureau of Genealogy (CBG).

The Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO) is a standard to make historical occupations comparable across time and space, similar to the contemporary ISCO codes. The HSNDB provides donated occupational titles in a multitude of languages via:

• as CSV files
• as Linked Open Data (RDF) including introductory data stories

For the Netherlands HSNDB has been releasing a standardized list of occupational titles and concomitant HISCO codes since 2013. All titles are standardized into a uniform spelling, and provided with a HISCO code.

The Historical Database of Dutch Municipalities (Historische Database Nederlandse Gemeenten) is a database that holds different historical characteristics of Dutch municipalities, such as population size, election results, industrialization, and migration.

The Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) was initiated during the period 1987−1989 when an interdisciplinary and interuniversity group of Dutch scholars started discussing the foundation of one large database with data on individuals.

LINKS is a linking system for historical family reconstruction. The core data of the LINKS system consists of indexed civil certificates. These certificates are available from 1812 — the start of the Dutch Vital Registration — until the year they are confidential based on privacy laws.

Research Question(s)