RECORDLINK is a collaboration of Canadian and international institutions committed to reconstructing individual life experiences on a large scale through the identification of the same people in multiple sources through time.  A new vision of historical change emerges from the systematic analysis of many thousands of individual and family trajectories.  The resulting longitudinal data will enable innovative research into early-life and intergenerational influences on adult health, occupational and residential mobility and other topics.

The construction of longitudinal data from imprecise historical data draws from data mining and pattern recognition methods that have been applied to genres as diverse as the reconstitution of personal health files via medical record linkage, empirical social science, digital humanities and the internet search engines. Two post-doctoral fellows, Luiza Antoniefrom Computing Science at the University of Alberta and Andrew Ross from History at the University of Western Ontario provide leadership in the current round of longitudinal data construction.

The next historical linkage workshop at Guelph will be held May 24-25 2010. For further information please contact Professor Kris Inwood.