Great Britain Historical GIS Project A Vision of

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time From a historical GIS to an on-line administrative gazetteer of Great Britain Humphrey Southall (University of Portsmouth) –Two part presentation: –Outline of GBHGIS Project: not a Gazetteer project! –Implications of GBHGIS becoming an (ADL-compliant? ) gazetteer (while remaining many other things!) 18 th July 2002

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Outline history of GBHGIS – October 1989 -September 1991: Labour Markets DB project – October 1994: Start of new one year, one RA GIS project – Adding boundaries to existing LMDB (Poor Law statistics, etc) – Summer 1995: Collaborative funding to extend GIS – London, 20 th century local govt districts – January 1997: Work starts on parish mapping – Five person team with varied funding – Spring 1998: $1/3 m. from ESRC; two teams – Systematic computerisation of census data – January 2000: Relocation to Portsmouth – Wellcome Trust funding for history of mortality – October 2001: National Lottery funding begins. – March 2002: We recruit a librarian! – January 2003: Launch of initial web site – September 2004: End of current funding 18 th July 2002 2

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Changing goals – Personal research: Origins of the north-south divide – Making sense of data for diverse ‘districts’ – Academic collaborations: Frameworks for mapping change – Mortality in the Metropolis 1860 -1920 – 1881 Census Project – Hearth Tax Project – Policy-relevance: Long-run demographic change – Support from Office of National Statistics – Contributing to ESRC Health Variations Programme – ‘ 200 years of the census of population’ – Collaboration with ‘memory’ institutions – British Library; English Heritage; National Council on Archives; Public Record Office 18 th July 2002 3

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Britain’s North-South Divide: Economic Distress in 2 centuries – – Was the north more prosperous than the south pre-1914? There is a wealth of statistical information but relates to unfamiliar and changing geographies – These maps compare Poor Law statistics with unemployment data from government and trade union sources – We also hold data on small debt cases and the marriage rate – The real detail is at district level 18 th July 2002 4

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Britain’s North-South Divide: Spatial divisions of labour • Long-run trends in occupational structure – From Langton (1984): specialisation by product; the Industrial Revolution increased disparities – To Massey (1984): specialisation by role within the production process, hence an evolving class divide • Tress Index measures degree of specialisation: – High specialisation is not necessarily the result of heavy industry – Leamington Spa: over 50% of workforce in 1841 were domestic servants 18 th July 2002 5

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Collaborations: the 1881 census • Data list all individual inhabitants of Great Britain in 1881 • Map shows distribution of everyone with the surname ‘Southall’ Data from Kevin Schurer & Matthew Woollard (Essex) Base map from Great Britain Historical GIS 18 th July 2002 6

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Collaborations: mapping the 1289 Taxatio 18 th July 2002 7

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time A Vision of Britain through Time – – $930, 000 budget over 3 years From UK National Lottery via New Opportunities Fund: Builds on a series of earlier research grants since 1994 … but this is not research: – Presenting the history of Britain and its localities – to ‘life long learners’ – over the web – Re-use of existing data, plus some new digitisation – NB grant application had to focus on new digitisation so aspects of final system still being defined – Major emphasis on enhancing metadata – Enhanced data integrity via cross-checking and constraining 18 th July 2002 8

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time NOF-Digitise • New Opportunities Fund: financed by UK National Lottery – Supports projects in education, health and the environment • ‘Digitisation of Learning Materials’ - $75 m. NOF programme – Three overall themes: – Cultural enrichment; Citizenship in a modern state; Reskilling the nation – 151 projects in 45 consortia, mainly based in libraries, museums and archives • Sense of Place (National) consortium – Largest single NOF consortium by value – Four partner organisations: – – British Library: In. Place ($4. 8 m) Great Britain Historical GIS ($0. 93 m) Strathclyde University: VISCOUNT: Victorian Social Conditions ($0. 52 m) Edinburgh University: Supporting partner, hosting GBHGIS site etc • GBHGIS Project is itself a university-based consortium 18 th July 2002 9

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Project Organisation 18 th July 2002 10

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Additional Digital Content – An edition of the census reports: – More census data (c. 3 m. values): education, language, parish populations, plus mortality – The introductory text from every census report (4, 750 pp) as text, and maybe image scans of the entire contents – The full text of Guide to Census Reports: Great Britain 18011966 (279 pp) – Adding text and maps: – Three descriptive historical gazetteers (c. 5, 500 pp) – The four best-known tours of Britain – Wm. Cobbett, Daniel Defoe, Cecilia Fiennes and Arthur Young (1, 972 pp) – Two complete Ordnance Survey one inch-to-the-mile series (302 sheets): C 19 1 st series + 1940 s ‘New Popular’ 18 th July 2002 11

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Our commitments include: – An integrated and comprehensive gazetteer/place-name authority list for historical administrative units in Great Britain, linking information about the same place from our different sources. – Database-driven ‘home pages’ for every administrative unit – about 25, 000 pages, for just about every town and village – giving access to our own and our partners’ data. – Visualisation tools presenting our statistical information as interactive maps and graphics, each tailored to the particular source and tested with real users. – An on-line historical atlas of Britain, combining these visualisations with explanatory text – an authored work 18 th July 2002 12

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Sample Census Page 18 th July 2002 13

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time An edition of the censuses IS a gazetteer • Census reports are the largest single source of information on historical administrative units: • • What units existed (NB corporate bodies as well as locations) Dates of creation, etc Hierarchical relationships … and what they were like (demography, economy, etc) • Main contents of reports are statistical tables in which rows relate to named sub-areas • ALL data, including national totals, are polygon attribute data (so long as we know the polygon!) • Reports contain few maps, but link to published and unpublished maps of boundaries • 1 st GB censuses predate 1 st boundary maps > missed parishes 18 th July 2002 14

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time GB Administrative Geography very complex • These are just the main hierarchies used by one census • Between 1801 and present, 4+ distinct kinds of ‘county’ • Each geography experienced constant change • As usual, hierarchic relationships often invalid • See my forthcoming article: – ‘Defining Census Geographies: International Perspectives’ in theme issue on Defining Geography, in the Association of Public Data Users’ publication Of Significance 18 th July 2002 15

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time But it must also be a reverse Gazetteer • Most basic question: tell me what the area containing my home/school was like in the past? • Life-long learners do not know what historical unit(s) their home or school used to be locate in • Location to place-name via point in polygon search single most important piece of functionality – NB v. different from most on-line GIS systems • An access route both into our own holdings and other collections: provides names to search under – UK network of local archives catalogue primarily by parish – Direct link between GBHGIS and National Register of Archives’ ARCHON system 18 th July 2002 16

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Proposed structure: A spatio-temporal DB • Server: Oracle + Oracle Spatial/Locations (Postgre. SQL+Post. GIS) • Client: Geo. Tools – a Java-based open source visualisation toolkit (OGC compliant) – Tighter integration of locational and attribute data – Drastic simplification of attribute data tables: – Units: all the spatial entities we know about – Footprints: locations at different dates (points, bounding boxes or polygons) – Attributes: ALL the information we know about the units – Sources: where the information came from 18 th July 2002 17

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Possible structure: a more elaborate version 18 th July 2002 18

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Issues: Organising attribute information • Our largest outstanding issue – Statistical data form the largest part of our collection – Over 30 m individual data values, from the census, etc – But how do we find the right data value? • How do we systematically record what each value measures? – Geography and chronology are relatively easy – We know what each value in the current system measures by the table and column it appears in – … but this requires several hundred separate tables • The Data Documentation Initiative – Joint initiative by social science data archives incl ICPSR – XML-based standard, primarily concerned with microdata – Aggregate/Tabular Data Extension developed primarily at University of Minnesota; being used by US National Historical GIS ($5 m from NSF) • Final outcome may be systematic cataloguing of our collection down to the individual data values 18 th July 2002 19

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Issues: Contextual • We are funded to create a web site, not a service – So what relevance do XML-based representations have? • GB national mapping agency operates commercially – Our system based on out-of-copyright material (>50 years) – So how do we link to modern geo-spatial frameworks? • Divide between university and public library sectors – JISC-funded digital library projects much further advanced – But NOT open access: faculty and students only • So complex potential relationship with Geo-X-Walk – Even though EDINA will be hosting our web site! – Half NOF program funding goes to place-specific projects, but program portal will be based on collection-level DC 18 th July 2002 20

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Issues: Performance • We do not know how many users we will have: • Open-access site funded by British Library • English law: ALL 9 year olds must write a local history project covering ‘trends in population’, etc • Millions interested in family/local history: Public Record Office 1901 census site went live 2/1/02; crashed same day; still down • Library of Congress (entire site): c. 4 m hits per day • ADL gazetteer handles high 10 s/low 100 s requests per day (? ) • Or what they will do with it: • Place-name look-up less demanding than point-in-polygon search (esp if maps pre-prepared) • More specialised queries, e. g. adjacency? • Richer user interface for expert users, e. g. archivists? • Designing site to progressively close off facilities under load 18 th July 2002 21

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Issues: ADL-specific • Has anyone implemented a large ADL-compliant gazetteer with full time-variant polygonal footprints? • ADL Feature Type Thesaurus inappropriate to an administrative gazetteer, in which types are legally defined – Too few levels (we need seven) – No indication of function (civil, religious, electoral, etc) • Language-specific preferred names (Tenby/Dinbychy-y-pysgod) • Official names change over time, sometimes drastically: – “Footscray Urban District was renamed 'Sidcup' by County Council Naming Order, which took effect 1 st January, 1921. ” • Supporting longitude/latitude and OSGB National Grid – Similar issue for most European countries; software cost? • Should we include any or all of our statistical content in the ‘gazetteer’? Was the standard designed to cover this? • Explicit relationship information or inference from polygons? 18 th July 2002 22

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Towards Geography Servers? • (Once again): A monolithic web site, not a gazetteer service – Interaction (GML, JDBC) with our own client applets – Ad hoc interworking with ARCHON, Neighbourhood Statistics (modern census data), BL/In. Place (? ) • Clear potential to contribute to gazetteer service • … But what other web services could be exposed? – – Geographical visualisation of data in conventional DBs Vector (GML) cartographic frameworks Raster mapping as underlays BL demo system (uses Digital Chart of the World) • Remote possibility of EU 6 th Framework funding 18 th July 2002 23

Great Britain Historical GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time For more information – Newsletter: Historical GIS News (supply here) – Our web site: – www. gbhgis. org – currently a source of information about the project, but will be address of the final site – Separate Geo. Tools site: www. geotools. org – Our e-mail list: – http: //www. jiscmail. ac. uk/lists/history-gis. html – NB most members from outside the UK – Upcoming meetings: – September 10 th: Session on GBHGIS project within Digital Resources in the Humanities (Edinburgh, UK) – October 24 th: Session on ‘Metadata for Time and Space’, within the Social Science History Association annual meeting (St. Louis, MO) 18 th July 2002 24