The "Census Reports" part of Vision of Britain has now been slightly 
extended:  as well as listing what tables existed, it can actually 
reconstruct 17 of those 5,000 odd tables.

This may not sound very many, but they are fairly large ones:  the 
parish-level tables for England and Wales from EVERY census 1851 to 
1951, and the equivalent tables for Scotland with the exceptions of 
1851, 1871 and 1931.  The 1851 table provides population totals from 
every previous census back to 1801, so for England and Wales we now 
have on-line full population totals data at parish-level on-line 
covering 1801 to 1951.

The way this works is that the "Census Reports" home page now has TWO 
timeline/date selection bars, and the upper one limits the 
information listed to reports and tables where we hold actual 
content.  Within the table listings, the table numbers are now 
hyperlinks where we can do reconstructions.  Short-circuiting this, 
here are the links straight into the 1851 and 1951 tables:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/table_page.jsp?tab_id=GB1851POP2_M[1]&show=DB

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/table_page.jsp?tab_id=EW1951COU_M3&show=DB

Vision of Britain is mainly about presenting information on-screen, 
rather than allowing downloads, and our pages have to work on every 
imaginable web browser, rather than for (say) people using Microsoft 
Internet Explorer who also have Microsoft Excel installed.  This 
complicates presenting tabular data, but what we offer is a 
"drill-down" system.  When you first request a table, you see just 
the national total row and the next level down, i.e. counties;  but 
clicking on the downwards arrow next to a county takes you to a table 
listing that county and its component districts.  The parish tables 
usually have a lot of columns, which we cannot show all on screen at 
the same time, so there are also hyperlinks for scrolling left and right.

At the moment, the only link into the rest of the site is that the 
names of units are hyperlinks, and clicking on them takes you to the 
relevant unit home page.  However, we should shortly be adding 
another set of links at the bottom of each page which take you to 
statistical maps we can create based on the table.  This feature is 
context-sensitive:  if the current data are for the districts within 
a particular county, the map you get will be for those districts, and 
showing that county and its surroundings, not the whole country.

There is obviously a silly aspect to what is now on-line:  you can 
now find out the population of each individual parish without having 
to go to a library which has a complete run of census reports, but 
you still have to look at each report in turn to assemble a time 
series.  As what has just gone on-line is not the fastest part of the 
site, this could get tedious.  Given that the census data are all 
tightly linked to our gazetteer of administrative units -- which is 
how we can provide those hyperlinks -- something better is obviously 
coming.  It is in fact very nearly ready, and it has reached the 
point where one of the main issues is what copyright notices need to 
appear -- which is also why the above list of census dates does not 
include 1961:  we also computerised that table, but it is still in 
Crown Copyright.

The "something better" that is coming is, of course, an extension to 
the unit pages in the main part of the site;  when it arrives, the 
existing "theme for unit" pages will give access to more detailed 
statistical data as well as the "rates" they currently lead to.  Once 
that is in place I will say more about how the system organises its 
data.  For now, I will just say that when you are "drilling down" 
within the parish tables you are in fact navigating exactly the same 
structures as appear within our "relationships" pages.  Although the 
"relationships" pages are based primarily on information from Youngs' 
Local Administrative Units", you may have noticed that many of the 
variant names and even some of the units and their relationships come 
from census parish tables:  internally, the two kinds of source are 
woven very tightly into the one structure.

Obviously, there are a lot more census table reconstructions to appear.

Best wishes,

Humphrey Southall
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ====================================
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

Web site:	http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
About us:	http://www.gbhgis.org