Scientific Presentations

LabTalks­@DCD

Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, March 26, 2025

11:00 AM: Talk with Pietro Violo - Online obituaries for mortality monitoring in Canada

Abstract

Every day, over 400 obituaries are published on funeral home websites across Canada, representing about half of all recorded deaths. These commemorative texts contain valuable information—such as marital status, kinship details, and more—that is often unavailable elsewhere at this level of granularity. Their near-instant availability warrants a thorough analysis of whether this corpus can serve as a real-time data source for mortality monitoring. This series of papers explores methods for web scraping obituary data, cleaning and extracting relevant information, and detecting biases by comparing the extracted data against ground-truth sources.

About

Pietro Violo, a second-year Ph.D. student in demography at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of Prof. Nadine Ouellette. My research focuses on the use of digital traces and web-based data to estimate population-level mortality trends, as well as the application of machine learning in the social sciences. While at MPIDR, I will be working with Marília Nepomuceno.

Room 400