The Deed Machine
The Deed Machine is a multi-language set of tools that use OCR and crowdsourced transcription to identify racially restrictive covenant language, then map the results.
Racial covenants are clauses that were inserted into property deeds to prevent people who are not white from buying or occupying land. As of June 2024, Mapping Prejudice volunteers have helped to map more than 52,000 covenanted properties across 3 states, with more on the way soon.
The Deed Machine was created at Mapping Prejudice at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Current collaborators include Michael Corey, David Naughton, Tyler Fisher, Katlyn Alapati, Mike Tigas, and the University of Minnesota Libraries IT staff.
Deed Machine full workflow
The Deed Machine
Common workflows
- Starting a workflow
- Uploading images/initial processing
- Ingesting results of initial processing
- Prepping Zooniverse/uploading to Zooniverse
- Uploading modern parcel data for mapping
- Re-loading parcel shapefile(s)
- Downloading new batches of Zooniverse results
- Mapping covenants
- How to manually map or clean up a covenant
- Migrating ZooniverseSubjects to a new workflow
Django models
- Django model structure
- apps.deed.models.py
- apps.parcel.models.py
- apps.plat.models.py
- apps.zoon.models.py
AllCovenantedDocsManualCovenantManagerAllCovenantedDocsZooniverseManagerExtraParcelCandidateManualCorrectionManualCovenantManualCovenantParcelPINLinkManualParcelPINLinkManualSupportingDocumentReducedResponse_QuestionReducedResponse_TextUnmappedZooniverseManagerValidationZooniverseManagerZooniverseResponseProcessedZooniverseResponseRawZooniverseSubjectZooniverseUserZooniverseWorkflow