The link address doesn't seem to work .... or is it just me?
Gerard McSweeney
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Humphrey Southall" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 11:02 AM
Subject: William Camden's -- if not Nicholas Crane's -- Brittania on-line


Having watched the first of the three BBC programmes "Nicholas Crane's 
Britannia: The Great Elizabethan Journey", the connection with William 
Camden was a bit limited, but judging by our search logs the programmes will 
still produce a surge of interest in Camden and his book.

The obvious problem facing the programme makers was that the book covers 
thousands of places (literally -- see below) while a talking head can visit 
only a few.  It is therefore worth point out that the whole text, in 
Holland's English translation, is available on the Vision of Britain site.

This is NOT the best place on the web to read the whole text.  There are 
annotated parallel texts, in English and Latin, on the site created by Dana 
Sutton of the University of California and hosted by Birmingham University:

  www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit

The text on Vision of Britain was very generously supplied by Professor 
Sutton, and we hold only the English version and have taken out his 
annotations.  However, what we have added is maybe more useful to people 
with specifically local interests and a limited amount of time: we have 
systematically marked up the places mentioned within the text which has two 
consequences:

<> As you read the text, the placenames usually appear as hyperlinks, and 
clicking on them takes you to a place page which includes a map of where the 
place is.

<> The Birmingham site has no kind of search facility.  Ours does include a 
rather basic free-text facility covering all our travel narratives, but the 
place names used by Camden are often very different from the modern form. 
More usefully, therefore, you can search for places by their modern names 
and see whether there are links to Camden.  The way this works is that you 
type the place name into our home page, which takes you to our "place page". 
If there is a link called "Travellers' Tales" near the top of that page, 
then there is a mention somewhere in the collection of travel narratives. 
Clicking on that link takes you to a list of the pages in the narratives 
that mention that place, and clicking on an item in that list takes you to 
the first mention of the place on the relevant page.

At present, a total of 2,688 places in Great Britain have been identified as 
mentioned in the collection.  Camden is much the longest and most thorough 
of the "narratives", and 1,875 of the places mentioned are mentioned by 
Camden.

There were a few place names mentioned by Camden which I could not identify, 
but the larger limitation is that the current system is built around a set 
of "places" derived from our very systematic gazetteer of administrative 
units.  In practice, this means that the linked places do not include 
physical features, most landed estates, and settlements which did not give 
their name at least to a parish; the last is mainly a problem in Scotland.

A new version of A Vision of Britain through Time will be launched in the 
next few months with many enhancements.  One of them is that it has a new 
gazetteer of places based mainly on the Ordnance Survey's 1953 "Gazetteer of 
Great Britain", extended to include everywhere else in our current 
gazetteer.  When I marked up Brittania, I tried to mark up all settlements 
whether or not they were in our current gazetteer, so a lot more links 
should appear almost automatically once we move to the new system.  The 
underlying architecture of the new system has been extended to cover 
Ireland, which should also benefit the presentation of Camden (the 
architectural extension is actually to the whole of Europe, but that is far 
from meaning we will have equally systematic coverage of the whole of 
Europe).


Humphrey Southall,
Reader/Director GB Historical GIS,
Department of Geography,
Buckingham Building,
University of Portsmouth,
PORTSMOUTH PO1 3HE
Historical GIS team: 023 9284 2500