Using Newspaper Articles to Track Local Legislative Changes

Municipal laws address issues that are salient to local communities. They typically regulate matters such as zoning, local traffic rules, noise ordinances, building codes, and the use of public spaces, directly impacting residents' day-to-day lives. However, unlike for federal and state level laws, no database exists to study changes to municipal legislation. It is difficult to create a snapshot of current municipal codes because the relevant information is dispersed, and this problem is compounded when trying to reconstruct their history further back in time. In this project, we will try to reconstruct the history of certain types of municipal ordinances by analyzing historical newspaper articles. We will extract and analyze the text from a collection of digitized newspaper articles to determine whether the articles describe specific types of municipal ordinances that were in place, were being proposed, or were being repealed at the time. Based on this information we will try to construct a history of local ordinances for U.S. cities.