Universe of Swedish Plants
The Universe of Swedish Plants (USP) database is an ongoing project collecting information on all manufacturing plants in Sweden from 1900 up until the late 1960s.
The data is unique in it's scope and rich detail, containing information on the number of workers, by gender and occupational group as well as detailed information on the use of different kinds of propulsion.
Material and collection
The data in USP come from survey material collected by Kommerskollegium. Because all firms above a certain size had to report to the survey, the surveys covered virtually the universe of plants in manufacturing in Sweden. After collecting the material we use table segmentation and OCR methods to excerpt the relevant data. We then use a combination of natural-language-processing techniques to clean the data.
Researchers
William Skoglund, Johan Ericsson, and Jakob Molinder are the participating researchers working on data collection and curation of the database.
Ericsson is funded by FORTE within the project: Hälsoeffekterna av industriella utsläpp på (väldigt) lång sikt which has received a 2,228,000 SEK grant.