Dear All,
As many list members will know, I am both "owner" of this list and the
director of the British Isles Historical GIS Project, which is constructing
a record of changing administrative boundaries down to parish-level (over
15,000 units for England and Wales alone), linked to a large database of
historical statistics, combining data provided by many collaborators with
very extensive new transcriptions from the published census reports. These
transcriptions are being created by a team at the Centre for Data
Digitisation and Analysis at the Queen's University Belfast, led by Paul
Ell and using a specialised ProLector Optical Character Recognition system.
We have tried to post regular progress reports to this list but there has
been little news for some time, partly because following a lot of publicity
-- and many conference appearances -- during 1998, our main priority for
1999 has been breaking the back of our resource creation commitments. The
other reason, especially over the last six months, has been that some very
large developments have been awaiting written confirmation. Much of what
follows is actually "old news" for a few people, but can only be announced
now:
(1) Ian Gregory, the research fellow who has been leading the construction
of our historical GIS since 1994, and I are moving from Queen Mary &
Westfield College in London to the Department of Geography at the
University of Portsmouth, on England's south coast, with effect from the
1st of January 2000. This means that we will be joining a department with
better infrastructure for GIS-based research than QMW, and a department
which is already the base for a significant number of other specifically
historical projects employing GIS technology. Portsmouth will be funding
Ian from internal funds for a further four years once his ESRC funding ends
next year (i.e. to 2004). Moving the British Isles project to Portsmouth
is intended to establish Portsmouth as the pre-eminent international centre
for historical GIS, and there will be further announcements.
(2) Also on the 1st of January, I start a new two year research fellowship
funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. This frees me
completely from teaching, and is partly intended to allow me to work on two
major writing projects. However, it will also enable me to better manage
the project and develop other activities linked to historical GIS, such as
the European workshop on historic boundary mapping that we are hoping the
European Science Foundation will fund next summer (further announcement
next month, hopefully). The University of Portsmouth have agreed that I
will be free of undergraduate teaching until September 2002.
(3) The Wellcome Trust have awarded a new grant of c. Pnds 160,000 for a
project on the geography of mortality decline in Britain since 1851,
running through to September 2002. This will enable a new research team to
be established at Portsmouth and also funds Paul's group in Belfast from
the end of their ESRC funding next Easter to September 2001, working mainly
on vital registration data from the Registrar General's reports. One
aspect of this project is that it will link a large historical database
covering the development of the hospital system in Britain, developed at
Portsmouth by John Mohan (ex-QMW), into the historical GIS. Other
co-applicants and formal collaborators on this project are Margaret
Crawford (Belfast), Danny Dorling (Bristol), Ian Jones (St. George's
Hospital Medical School, London -- also ex-QMW), Gerry Kearns (Cambridge)
and Graham Mooney (Wellcome Institute, London).
(4) We have also been awarded a total of Pnds 15,000 by the Marc Fitch
Fund, the Aurelius Trust and the National Monument Record (part of English
Heritage) to fund the first stages of the construction of a much more
comprehensive historical gazetteer and placename thesaurus for England (and
hopefully Wales), which will be a useful resource in itself as well as
helping us link statistical data to the boundary GIS. The precise scope of
the gazetteer remains to be defined and will partly depend on further
funding, but this new funding commits us to create a computerised version
of Frederic Youngs' _Local Administrative Units_, the reference work which
comes closest to being a definitive place-name authority list for England;
copyright is held by the Royal Historical Society, who have given us
permission to do this. Youngs provides information on a whole series of
hierarchies of units, including "ancient" civil units and ecclesiastical
units. We hope to link in other information we have already computerised,
such as lists of 19th and 20th century boundary changes, and earlier
information created by various transcription projects. We will be making
the resulting dataset available to the History Data Service at Essex, who
will hopefully be able to use it as the basis for an on-line enquiry
service. Work should start in Portsmouth next spring but, even though the
current funding covers only slightly over a year's work, we are not
promising to deliver anything until 2002.
This is obviously an initial announcement of some large developments, and
more detail should follow; note that we should be taking on three new RAs
in Portsmouth, one specifically in historical GIS, although some of the
funding does not start until October next year. There is more information
about the project as a whole on our web site. Some of this is now a bit
out of date, and is likely to remain so until we are established at
Portsmouth with a new web site:
http://www.geog.qmw.ac.uk/hgis
Non-UK list members should note that Ian Gregory and myself, plus
colleagues from Portsmouth involved in historical GIS, will be at the
Social Science History Association in Fort Worth next month, where we are
involved in a number of sessions related to historical GIS.
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
(Director, British Isles Historical GIS)
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Dr. Humphrey Southall,
Reader in Geography,
Department of Geography,
Queen Mary and Westfield College,
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON,
Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS, ENGLAND
Direct Line: 0171-975-5413
Dept. Fax: 0181-981-6276
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