Great Britain Historical GIS project
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Grant Holder:
The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System is a unique digital collection of information about Britain's localities as they have changed over time. Information comes from census reports, historical gazetteers, travellers' tales and historic maps, assembled into a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts.
| Project start date: 1989-01 |
Subject domains:
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| Cataloguing and indexing | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Content-based image retrieval | Data analysis |
| Documentation | Strategy and project management |
| Geo-referencing and projection | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Graphical rendering | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Heads-up digitising and interactive tracing | Data capture |
| Text encoding - presentational | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Overlaying | Data analysis |
| Parsing | Data analysis |
| Searching and querying | Data analysis |
| Text recognition | Data capture |
| Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) | Metadata standards |
| text | Content types |
Funding sources:
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Wellcome Trust, Marc Fitch Fund, English Heritage, Aurelius Trust, Pilgrim Trust, Big Lottery Fund, British Library, Environment Agency, Frederick Soddy Trust, Natural England, Nuffield Foundation, Population Investigation Committee, Roehampton Institute, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Economic and Social Research Council, The Leverhulme Trust
Content types created:
Dataset/structured data, Still Image/Graphics, Text
Software tools used:
ArcGIS, ERDAS Imagine, Adobe Photoshop, Oracle, MapInfo, PostgreSQL, MapServer, ProLector, ArcInfo, Oracle Spatial, PostGIS
Source material used:
Historical statistics - on census reports, data on births, marriages and deaths, and unemployment and poor law statistics.
10m. words of text: of accounts of journeys around Britain cross-referenced by place to the rest of our system; over 90,000 entries from descriptive gazetteers published in the late 19th century, describing towns, villages and landmarks; and the main report from every census up to 1961.
Digital resource created:
A large integrated database of geographically-located historical statistics for Great Britain.
The main on-line resource is the A Vision of Britain through Time web site, originally created with funding from the UK National Lottery and expanded and enhanced for re-launch in 2009 with funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee. http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/
Data Formats created:
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), JPEG File Interchange Format (JPG), Structured Query Language (SQL), Extensible Markup Language (XML) TEI-compliant
Metadata standards employed:
Dublin Core, simple (DC), Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Project staff and expertise:
| Principal staff member: | Dr Humphrey Southall |
|---|---|
| Other staff: | Postdoctoral researcher(s) / Research assistant(s) |
| External expertise: |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | Paula Aucott |
| Title | Great Britain Historical GIS project |
| Record created | 2010-04-13 |
| Record updated | 2010-04-28 11:46 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3329 |
| Citation of record | Paula Aucott: Great Britain Historical GIS project. <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3329> created: 2010-04-13, last updated 2010-04-28 11:46 |