About this project:

The primary source of data is drawn from The Bond Buyer’s Directory of Municipal Bond Dealers in the United States. The dataset, built by Destin Jenkins, Moksha Sharma, and Brooke Luetgert, is based on decennial directories (1931, ’41, ’51, ’61, ’71, and ’81) and historical research by Destin Jenkins. Newspaper articles from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, among other titles, came from the ProQuest Historical Newspaper database. 

The project employed several tools. The “book-eye scanner” offered high-resolution, hands-off scanning technology. Images pulled from the directories went in at about 600 dpi. To optimize the contrast and to remove the ‘bleed’ and ‘spots,’ these images were then edited using Adobe Photoshop. We then applied Abbie Fine Reader Optical Character Recognition technology, which left us with TXT files. Using python, Brooke Luetgert parsed this raw data to establish a spreadsheet. This data was then plotted by Parmanand Sinha using ArcGIS. After careful digitization, these sources provide the historical record of how the municipal bond business expanded across the United States over this critical fifty year period.  

The project was completed over 2019-2021 through support from the University of Chicago’s Visualization for Understanding and Exploration (VUE) project, the Neubauer Family Assistant Professorship Program, and the History Department.