Shibboleth access issues – fixed

The Shibboleth access issues we experienced in May have now been resolved. We apologise to any of the UK academic community who were trying to access our restricted data download facility during this time.

Starting a long goodbye to .jsp

We went live with a couple of new features today.

URL rewriting: If you look at your browser’s address bar, for many pages it will now display a shorter address. For example, the “place page” for Evesham is now:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/1002

Note that the old address still works:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=1002

So what has changed? Behind the scenes, the new address is in fact being rewritten to the old address via a set of “rewrite rules” running at quite a high level within our server. However, from now on we want people to use the new addresses for two reasons:

– They are not tied to particular technology. For example, JSP is short for “Java Server Pages”, and you will see many other sites that instead use ASP (Active Server Pages) or PHP (Personal Hypertext Processor, I think). Any such addresses will change if the site gets hosted on a different kind of server.

– The new addresses have been consciously designed and reflect the underlying structure of our information. As such, they meet the general rules for URIs; Uniform Resource Identifiers. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_identifier

And:

https://update.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/designing-uri-sets-uk-public-sector

Some more examples of these new addresses:

Evesham Municipal Borough home page:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10193930

Population time series for Evesham MB:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10193930/cube/TOT_POP

It is going to take some time to implement these new addresses across the whole site, and we apologise for any glitches that arise during this process.

New search interface to data documentation: we have been working for some time to make our statistical content easier to access. Another step on the way is a simple keyword search interface for statistics:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/#tab04

Try terms like “unemployment”, “blacksmith” or “Irish Nationalist”. More about that later, once we have made it easier to reach not just the documentation but the actual data.

Humphrey Southall

New article about using A Vision of Britain for local history: Great Rollright

The Oxfordshire Family History Society has just published an article we have written about using the web site A Vision of Britain through Time to study the history of a single village, using the example of Great Rollright in Oxfordshire, site of the Rollright stones:

Aucott, Paula and Southall, Humphrey (2012) Using ‘A Vision of Britain through Time’ to investigate an Oxfordshire village. Oxfordshire Family Historian, 26 (3). pp. 165-172.

The Rollright Stones, as included in our version of William Camden’s Britannia

Clicking on the link takes you to a copy of our text we are making available on-line via the University of Portsmouth’s e-print repository, the actual address being:

http://eprints.port.ac.uk/9901

The repository also holds a paper we published in 2006 in Local Population Studies. The screen shots are of the original pre-2009 site whose organisation was a little different, but the earlier article goes into a bit more technical detail:

http://eprints.port.ac.uk/9521

As a result of our article, Cliff Baughen has sent us this map of Great Rollright that appeared in the Oxfordshire Record Society’s The Manors and Advowson of Great Rollright by Reginald Jeffery (1927):

Great Rollright c. 1800

We now have more detailed Irish historical maps

We are continuing to improve our coverage of Ireland.

Up to now, the only historical mapping was what we have for more or less the whole of Europe: 1:500,000 maps published by the British General Staff Geographical Survey in the 1940s. These show towns but few villages.

We have now added to the web site A Vision of Britain through Time  more detailed maps at 1:126,720 scale, or two miles-to-one inch. These were also published by the British military in the 1940s,  but were based not on an aerial survey but on scaling down One Inch maps published by the Ordnance Survey in 1899-1914 — so our mapping is really of late nineteenth century Ireland, following construction of the railway network.

Detail from GSGS 4127 showing Dublin

We have built a continuous mosaic from these sheets and used it to extend the most detailed layer within our “20th century” mapping, which holds our New Popular one inch maps of Great Britain, so you can access these maps by simply zooming in further on Irish locations. The twenty-five individual map sheets can be accessed in the usual way within our map library, i.e. by scrolling down when the mosaic viewer is zoomed in on a relevant location, then clicking on the sheet thumbnail.

This Irish work is unfunded, but so far we include:

• Descriptive gazetteer entries: 3,939 detailed entries from Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837), plus 8,189 shorter Irish entries from Bartholomew’s Gazetteer of the British Isles (1887).
• Travel writers: Camden, Head’s Home Tour of the UK and both the Wesley’s visit Ireland — but they are not currently linked into Irish “places”.
• Administrative units: We currently include four provinces, thirty-two counties, 163 Irish poor law unions, 326 baronies and 24 recent Northern Ireland constituencies.
• Administrative boundaries: for all Irish counties, and most baronies.
• Historical statistics: 1,518 data values, all being nineteenth century Farm Census data for Irish counties.
• Places: Forty-one have been defined so far, covering the counties and a few others needed to make Northern Ireland constituency data accessible.

We have access to a great deal more Irish statistical data computerised for the Database of Irish Historical Statistics, but generating the additional DDI metadata required is what absolutely requires substantial funding. For now, our aim is primarily to create a comprehensive gazetteer of places and units. The next step will be adding parishes and townlands as more detailed administrative geographies from an 1850s listing, and then we will systematically define more “places” to link everything together.

Humphrey Southall

Sustaining A Vision of Britain through Time

The construction of this web site was originally funded by the Big Lottery Fund, with a major rebuild in 2009 funded by the UK Higher Education Funding Councils via their Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Many other grant-giving bodies have assisted in creation of the contents, and we are especially grateful to the Frederick Soddy Trust who have made a multi-year commitment.

However, the running costs of the web site are another matter, and they are substantial: over £9,000 for hosting in 2011-12, and we also have to pay for a new server. The original site was funded for three years by the British Library, and then by the JISC grant that was extending the system, but since 2009 we have had to pay our own way. Originally our main source of income was licensing data for commercial use, mainly to assist in establishing chancel repair liability. Changes to that rather obscure law mean this income is uncertain after 2013.

Fortunately, our income from advertising on the site has been growing, and I have just created this graph for a report I am writing. Using monthly data on user numbers and Google Ads income from April 2009 to October 2012, it shows that income is very closely related to the numbers of visitors to the site — and the highest figures for both are those for last month. Touch wood, so long as we continue to provide compelling content, we will continue to generate the income needed to make that content available. A virtuous circle.

Humphrey Southall

New travel writer: William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye

We have just added another book to our collection of historical British travel writing, William Gilpin’s Observations of the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales (London: Cadell Junior and W. Davies, 1800), describing journeys along the whole length of the river Wye, and also a circuit of south Wales, the first edition having been published in 1782. As always, the text has been integrated with our gazetteer, so names from Gilpin are included as variant place-names; and a few new places have been added to the gazetteer because Gilpin mentions them.

Gilpin was a founder of the picturesque movement, and the book contains little about the people he met but much discussion of why particular places are beautiful. The book is extensively illustrated by engravings made from Gilpin’s own sketches.

One consequence is that our collection now includes six of the nine books included in Nicholas Crane’s BBC series, Great British Journeys: Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Defoe’s Tour, Fiennes’ Through England, Gerald of Wales’ Journey through Wales, Gilpin and, as a separate short season, Camden’s Britannia. The three books we are missing are:

• John Leland’s Itinerary, which we would love to add, but cleaning up the text available via Google Books would be a lot of work.
• H.V. Morton’s writings on Scotland, published in the inter-war period and still in copyright.
• Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides (1772); but we do have his From Chester to London.

Adding the Isle of Man

The original Britain was strictly limited to England, Scotland and Wales. We are working on adding Ireland, and you will already find a few Irish “places” in the system. Recently we have made a more modest extension, to the Isle of Man.

This mainly means we have added 46 towns, villages and other places, with links to the associated descriptive gazetteer entries and with their locations shown against a Popular Edition one inch map that has been in the system all along:

Douglas: www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=26187
Snaefell: www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=26268

We have also added the full text of George Head’s second travel book, A Home Tour through various parts of the United Kingdom, where we previously had just three chapters about the west coast of Scotland, included with his A Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts. The book includes six chapters about his visit to the Isle of Man.

We hope at some point to add information about the parishes of the Isle of Man, including their boundaries and population data from the census.