Meta Information: Obituary Data

Data Source and Access
Source: The data is based on obituaries publicly posted online, for example, on aggregator websites such as NecroCanada.com or directly from funeral home websites.

Access & Conditions:

Web Scraping: If you wish to collect similar data, you may obtain it through web scraping these public sources.

Ethics: Important: Before web scraping, obtain ethics approval from your institution.

Distributing scraped data from NecroCanada.com or similar websites is not permitted due to their terms of use and ethical considerations.

License: No real data is distributed in this repository. We only share mock (synthetic) data generated by a large language model for demonstration purposes, which does not contain private or real personal information.

Data Overview
Number of Records: The shared mock dataset contains 1000 records, comparable to the 500,000 obituaries web scraped in the paper. For demonstration purposes.

Variables Used in Analysis:

Name: The name of the deceased individual (string).

Description: The full text of the obituary (string).

After extraction, these fields are discarded, and only demographic variables are retained for analysis.

Demographic Variables (in final analysis):
(Provide a list below of what demographic variables are retained, e.g. Age, Gender, Location, Date of Death, etc. Adjust as appropriate to your data and code.)

Age: Age of the deceased (integer)

Gender: Gender of the deceased (categorical: 'Man', 'Woman', 'NA')