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The Chicago Surveys are part of a long-running series of public opinion surveys conducted by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs every two years. The surveys are designed to investigate the opinions and attitudes of the general public on matters related to foreign policy, and to define the parameters of public opinion within which decision-makers must operate. This public opinion study of the United States focused on respondents' opinions of the United States' leadership role in the world and the challenges the country faces domestically and internationally. Data were collected on a wide range of international topics, including: United States relations with other countries, role in foreign affairs, possible threats to vital interests in the next ten years, foreign policy goals, benefits or drawbacks of globalization, situations that might justify the use of United States troops in other parts of the world, the number and location of United States military bases overseas, respondent feelings toward people of other countries, opinions on the influence of other countries in the world and how much influence those countries should have, international trade, United States participation in potential treaties, the United States' role in the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which side the United States should take in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and what measures should be taken to deal with Iran's nuclear program. Respondents were also asked their opinion on domestic issues including funding for various government programs, climate change, measures to address the United States' dependence on foreign energy sources, and their views of various groups' influence on United States policy. Demographic information collected include age, gender, race/ethnicity, marital status, left-right political self-placement, political affiliation, employment status, highest level of education, and religious preference, household income, state of residence, and living quarters ownership status.

Background This study contains the digitized data originally stored on 3"x5" index cards, archived at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Part of the Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (NARA Record Group 234), the Index to Loans on Veterans Administration Guaranteed Mortgages, 1946-1954 is an index of loans made by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Mortgage Company on Veterans Administration mortgages. Digitizing and Parsing The project team transformed the images into digital text through optical character recognition (OCR). After experimentation with multiple OCR engines, the team implemented two parallel workflows, each using Tesseract as its OCR engine: LayoutParser and Python-tesseract. The output of both were parsed into tabular datasets using regular expressions. For more information on the digitization and parsing processes, please refer to the project team's article. The combined output of those processes is presented as Dataset 1. Users should note that, although the project team took steps to find the most accurate OCR processes for this study, OCR is not perfect. There are errors in these data when compared against the original index cards. Cleaning and Geographic Standardization The project team was most interested in the name, city, and state fields in the OCR output. With this in mind, the team created a working dataset comprised of only those fields. The original images included images of the reverse sides of index cards when pencil notations were present; these records were removed from this working dataset. The index also included blue-colored cards that referred to other cards; these reference cards were also removed from the working file. The removal of these two types of records left 24,589 mortgage records in the dataset. Several steps were then taken to prepare the name, city, and state fields for future analysis. The name fields were parsed to separate middle names/initials as well as suffixes (Jr., III, etc.) from first names. The state field was standardized to the two-letter United States Postal Service state codes. The two-letter codes were also translated to their corresponding two-digit Federal Information Processing System (FIPS) codes. Using the standardized states, the team attempted to standardize each record's city to the United States Census Bureau's list of places. Attempts were made to deterministically match the city names to the Census Bureau's list. For unmatched records, probabilistic matching was used. Due to the inexact nature of probabilistic matching, the wrong place name or city FIPS code may have been assigned in error, in some cases. The result of this cleaning and geographic standardization is presented in Dataset 2. The project team created a truth deck of 1,000 records, hand-keyed from the original images. Each truth record contains the last name of the mortgagor(s), the name (whatever combination of first, middle, and suffix might appear on the card) of the first mortgagor, the name of the second mortgagor if applicable, the city, and the state. These hand-keyed records were then further parsed an,d geographically standardized in the same manner described above. This truth dataset is presented in Dataset 3. Dataset 4 is a combination of Datasets 2 and 3, with the truth records replacing the corresponding 1,000 records of Dataset 2.

The World War II Enlistment and Casualty Records data set contains individual-level information on soldiers who were drafted or volunteered for service in the U.S. armed forces during World War II. The repository consists of three files: The digitized list of fallen soldiers who served in the U.S. Army or Army Air Force by name, state, and county of residence (300,131 observations) The digitized list of fallen soldiers who served in the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard by name, state, and county of residence (65,507 observations) The World War II Army and Army Air Force Enlistment records which were merged with the list of fallen soldiers (8,293,187 observations)

In the course of staffing its assigned operations and the other activities in support of the armed forces during World War I, the American Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) recruited a grand total of 25,926 workers who, about equally divided between home and overseas assignments, served under the auspices of the organization. A partially machine-readable punch card was generated for each worker, including some or all of the following data: name, gender (men are on buff cards, women on white), African American Y/N (blue cards), year of birth, address, occupation, work placement, placement date, salary, date left or returned, qualifications, religion, placed home versus overseas, marital status, and education. The cards, which total approximately 27,600 including cross-reference cards, were digitized by the University of Minnesota Libraries and subsequently transcribed and indexed by FamilySearch International. The datasets include: DS1: Decoded data from all 27,000+ punch cards, including the name of the scanned image file that corresponds to that record DS2: Technical metadata for the digital scans DS3: Transcribed data from crowdsourcing via the Zooniverse platform Additionally, there is a zip package that contains the scanned images of all 27,000+ punch cards