Dear All,
Thanks to funding from a variety of sources, most
significantly a grant from the Economic and Social Research
Council for £260,000, teams at Queen Mary and Westfield College
and the Queen's University of Belfast have for a number of years
been constructing a historical Geographical Information System
for the British Isles. Much of this work is now complete. The
system allows the mapping of administrative boundaries for the
nineteenth and twentieth century with associated statistical
data, much of it taken from the published census reports.
Whilst the system is powerful, and contains some
statistical data for every part of Great Britain down to the
level of the parish, it is not easily accessible for users not
experienced in GIS technology. Hence, we are planning a major
application to the New Opportunities Fund Digitisation Programme
to make the resource available over the World Wide Web. As part
of this application we plan to digitise selected gazetteers and
trade directories which will describe places at different
periods of time in Britain. We intend, for example, to digitise
the 6 volume 1870 _Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales_. Do
members of the list know of other similar sources? We are
looking for printed material (to allow the use of Optical
Character Recognition technology) containing local information
but we really want sources that cover large areas of Britain. We
do not, for instance, want to OCR trade directories for
individual counties.
Best wishes,
Paul Ell
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Dr Paul S. Ell
Director
The Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis
School of Sociology and Social Policy
The Queen's University of Belfast
Belfast
BT7 1NN
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
WWW: www.qub.ac.uk/cdda/
Discussion list: www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/history-digitisation
Phone: +44 (0)28 90273408
FAX: +44 (0)28 90320668
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