great britain historical gis project: a vision of britain though time from a historical gis to an...

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!)

18th July 2002 2


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, 20th century local govt districts– January 1997: Work starts on parish mapping

– Five person team with varied funding– Spring 1998: $1/3m. 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

18th July 2002 3


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

18th July 2002 4


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 1 2 3 4Legend: (Quartiles):

Unemployment Pauperage

Mean Rate,1880-99

Mean Rate,1927-36

18th July 2002 5


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

Most diverse

Most specialised

Type ofspecialisation

1841 1921

Agriculture

Staple Industry

Light Industry

Professional

Degree ofspecialisation

18th July 2002 6


Collaborations: the 1881 census

• Data list all individual inhabitants of Great Britain in 1881

• Map shows distribution of everyonewith the surname‘Southall’Data from Kevin Schurer & Matthew Woollard (Essex)Base map from Great Britain Historical GIS

18th July 2002 7


Collaborations: mapping the 1289 Taxatio

N

Less than 2355

2355 to 4910

4911 to 8419

8420 and above

Valuation(pence)

Legend usesnested-means

(a) Raw Data

Less than 239

239 to 496

497 to 783

784 and above

Valuation(pence per km2)

Legend usesnested-means

(b) By Area

18th July 2002 8


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

18th July 2002 9


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: InPlace ($4.8m)

– Great Britain Historical GIS ($0.93m)

– Strathclyde University: VISCOUNT: Victorian Social Conditions ($0.52m)

– Edinburgh University: Supporting partner, hosting GBHGIS site etc

• GBHGIS Project is itself a university-based consortium

18th July 2002 10


Project Organisation

GISAssist. (p/t)

ProjectDirector

Mgt Committee

PortsmouthTeam Leader*

DigitisationTeam Leader

(Belfast)

Director, CCG/Professor Dorling

DatabaseOfficer

ClericalAssist. (p/t)

DigitisationOfficer

ITTrainee

Comp.Tech. (p/t)

VisualisationOfficer (Leeds)

DigitisationOfficer

ITTrainee

ITTrainee

ITTrainee

GISOfficer

GazetteersOfficer

Director, CDDA/Dr. Ell

InformationOfficer

18th July 2002 11


Additional Digital Content

– An edition of the census reports:– More census data (c. 3m. 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 1801-

1966 (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): C19 1st series + 1940s ‘New Popular’

18th July 2002 12


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

18th July 2002 13


Sample Census Page

18th July 2002 14


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

• 1st GB censuses predate 1st boundary maps > missed parishes

18th July 2002 15


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

18th July 2002 16


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

18th July 2002 17


Proposed structure: A spatio-temporal DB

• Server: Oracle + Oracle Spatial/Locations (PostgreSQL+PostGIS)

• Client: GeoTools – 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

sources footprintsattributes units

18th July 2002 18


Possible structure: a more elaborate version

sources footprintsattributes units

historicgazetteer

textsvolumespage

images

acknowl- edgments

contrib- utors

DDI A/TDE

source- image links

relationships

notes

map imagesroles

18th July 2002 19


Issues: Organising attribute information

• Our largest outstanding issue– Statistical data form the largest part of our collection– Over 30m 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 ($5m from NSF)

• Final outcome may be systematic cataloguing of our collection down to the individual data values

18th July 2002 20


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

18th July 2002 21


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.4m hits per day

• ADL gazetteer handles high 10s/low 100s 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

18th July 2002 22


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 1st 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?

18th July 2002 23


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/InPlace (?)

• 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 6th Framework funding

18th July 2002 24


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 GeoTools 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 10th: Session on GBHGIS project within Digital

Resources in the Humanities (Edinburgh, UK)

– October 24th: Session on ‘Metadata for Time and Space’, within the Social Science History Association annual meeting (St. Louis, MO)

great britain historical gis project: a vision of britain though time from a historical gis to an...

Documents

vision of britain

gazetteer project

gbhgis project

ra gis project

gis london

labour markets db project

census data list

unemployment data