Racist Deeds

The Racist Deeds Project aims to expand the identification of property deeds with racist restrictions, initially focusing on Longmeadow, Massachusetts. These restrictions, targeting marginalized groups like African Americans, were outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and locally in Massachusetts by 1946. This project seeks to streamline the identification process of discriminatory deeds to support the Longmeadow Historical Society. The focus of this semester is to build a data pipeline that will interact with deeds stored in a designated Google Drive location and potentially adjust some of the Gen AI prompts. The project will implement Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools via a Python package to digitize and extract text from scanned deed documents, which will facilitate more efficient analysis and pattern recognition. Additionally, there will be an effort to refine and adjust the Gen AI prompts to improve the mapping (property). Data Pipeline Outline: 1. Data Sources Location: Google Drive Format: .tiff 2. Data Extraction Method: Download files from Google Drive Tools: Python, Google Drive API 3. Data Transformation OCR Processing: • Tool: OCR tool (e.g., Tesseract) • Objective: Digitize and extract text from .tiff files Content Analysis: • Tool: OpenAI (e.g., GenAI) • Objective: Identify if the document contains racist restrictions 4. Data Loading Output– if Racist Restriction Detected: • Extract information about the document’s location in the registry database • Extract the physical location of the property tied to the deed • Destination: Excel sheet or Google Sheet