"A Vision of Britain through Time" is a publicly-funded and open
access web site which makes the results of historical surveys of
Britain, defined very broadly, systematically accessible for
locally-based research. Existing "surveys" include every census from
1801 to 2001, three complete sets of one inch to one mile maps of
Britain and the largest on-line collection anywhere of British travel writing:
www.visionofbritain.org.uk
We are pleased to announce that the Joint Information Systems
Committee has awarded us a major new grant of Pnds 398,700 (about $US
780,000), mainly to fund the creation of sets of computerised
boundaries for British Parliamentary Constituencies, starting with
those in force before the First Reform Act of 1831/2 and ending with
those in use between 1954 and 1974 (later boundaries already exist in
computerised form). Our name authority information will be extended
to include constituencies, which are the one part of Youngs' "Local
Administrative Units" we have not yet touched, and this information
on constituencies will then support the presentation of detailed
parliamentary election results, i.e. numbers of votes for each party
in each constituency at each election, based on F.W.S. Craig's
work. For more information about the funding, see:
www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digitisation/boundaries.aspx
Sadly, it will take us some time to do the work, so expect an
announcement that this information is actually on-line in the spring of 2009.
However, we can also announce that our collection of British
topographic writing has been extended to include William Camden's
Britannia. This is based on the work of Dana F. Sutton of the
University of California, Irvine, and anyone interested in Camden's
writing rather than in particular places he describes will find
Professor Sutton's existing site more useful. In particular, it
includes parallel Latin and English texts, while we provide only the
English version, which is a transcription of Philemon Holland's
English translation of 1610, based on Camden's final edition of 1607
and probably translated under Camden's direction:
http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit
The special attraction of our version is that, as with the rest of
our "Travellers' Tales" collection, additional work has been done on
the place-names within the text, linking to the rest of our
system. Each of the web pages into which we have divided the text,
generally covering two or three counties, begins with a map of the
places mentioned that have been identified, and the dots on the maps
are hyperlinks to the first mention. The place-names themselves are
also hyperlinks, taking you to our pages for the relevant place:
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/text/contents_page.jsp?t_id=Camden
This linkage also works in reverse, which will probably be useful to
more researchers and to teachers. If you go to our main home page
and simply type in the name of a town or major village that you are
interested in, you are taken to a "place page" which as well as
providing access to maps, census information and so on, provides
links to mentions of the place within the travel narratives. In
other words, you can quickly find quotes about your study area from
Camden, Defoe, Fiennes and so on. I have been using this as the
basis for a class assignment in which each student was required to
write about a different town.
We also have some small scale funding from the Department of the
Environment to work on historical farm census data, and a larger
project funded by the European Union which is laying foundations for
extending the system beyond Great Britain, so expect further
announcements. The new funding from JISC will allow us not just to
add content but to improve how the site works and develop associated
teaching materials. We want suggestions about how best to do this,
and invite anyone interested to join our more specialised discussion list:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/GBHGIS.html
Incidentally, anyone wanting to use those constituency boundaries in
their own research will be able to download them from AHDS HIstory or
the University of Edinburgh's UKBORDERS system, once we are done.
Humphrey Southall
(Great Britain Historical GIS and University of Portsmouth)
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: 0796 808 5454
About Britain: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
About us: http://www.gbhgis.org
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