The Role of Automatic Digitizers in Demography

The incorporation of facilities for automatically digitizing maps and drawings can considerably enhance the power of the computer in demographical research. A hardware-software process is described which can rapidly, economically, and automatically digitize hard-copy maps and drawings. The resultant computer data structures are a faithful and accurate representation of both the original geometry and topology and may thus serve as a direct source of data for analysis or display. The potential uses for this system appears to be large for, though maps and drawings are of fundamental importance to demographers, their transduction into computers has historically been stymied by the problems associated with tedious, inaccurate, and incomplete manual methods.