It is aimed at anyone wanting to create a digital resource from sources which are both historical and geographical – most obviously old maps, but also historical census information or geographically rich text. You may be planning on building a “historical GIS” or simply a web site with many maps – one aim is to help you decide the most appropriate final result for your particular sources and goals:

• We will equip you to do a small project in historical GIS or map-based digitization; or to plan and manage a larger project – so we include both hands-on training with GIS software, and sessions on source selection, project planning, copyright and budgeting.
• Hands-on training emphasizes Quantum GIS, a capable free open-source alternative to the commercial GIS software that historians and ‘memory institutions’ cannot afford, but most skills will be transferable to other programs.
• Quantum excels in accessing standards-based on-line GIS services, such as web map servers providing base maps. We will show you how to avoid starting from scratch, by accessing new online services and download facilities within the GB Historical GIS.
• Members of the GB Historical GIS team will teach core modules, but the course also features case studies presented by other members of Portsmouth Geography, and speakers from the Ordnance Survey, British Library and the National Archives.
• Hands-on sessions will have a maximum of ten attendees per leader.
• Our campus adjoins Portsmouth’s historic dockyard, home of the Royal Navy for five hundred years. The course includes a visit to the Admiralty Map Library, one of the world’s great historical map libraries but open to visitors only by special arrangement, and a dinner at the Royal Naval Club.
• Portsmouth is an hour and a half from London by train, and easily reached from London Heathrow, London Gatwick and Southampton airports. Car parking can be arranged.

Portsmouth Geography is the base for the Great Britain Historical GIS project and several other major online resources. Uniquely, we have not just twenty years experience in historical GIS, but over ten years of experience in employing Geographical Information Systems technology in standards-based digitization projects, with funding from the UK National Lottery, the Joint Information Systems Committee and the European Union.

• The 77 new “places” include all remaining “Ancient Districts” — Hundreds, Wapentakes, ancient Boroughs etc — except those in Wales, so they are findable from the home page. We also went through the descriptive gazetteer entries that were so far un-placed, and have created “places” for several interesting ones that were over 1,000 words long and were not linear features; for example, Salisbury Plain and the Carse of Gowrie:

Salisbury Plain

• The 151 new units include the seven “Conurbations” defined by the 1951 census, such as the West Midlands, the useful part being that we include the listings of which local government districts were parts of each; and 84 wards within the four Scottish cities, again as listed in 1951. There are of course many, many more Wards we could add.
• The 2,745 new names and 1,309 new relationships are partly in connection with those new units, but mainly the result of work to systematically link the 1831 census’s parish-level table into the system: the unusually detailed occupational statistics in that table are already accessible within the web site, but many parishes lacked data because the names or other information in the census list did not match. One key aspect of that is that although we have always included the information from Youngs’ Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England about which parish was in which hundred, we were not making practical use of it ourselves so various errors by Youngs and by ourselves persisted. That has now changed, although we have still to re-load the 1831 statistics to make them more complete, and Welsh administrative geography remains a challenge.

Obviously, this has been a general tidying-up operation, and the context is that we are starting to transfer the whole web site to a new server. We will not be announcing any further changes to the content until that migration is complete, in a couple of month’s time; but there will then be a lot of additional features in the software.

Fortunately, there will be plenty of developments with the separate Old Maps Online site in that period, so there will be no shortage of news on this blog.

WORKING DIGITALLY
WITH HISTORICAL MAPS

(1) BUILDING RICH RESOURCES (10:00 am – 11:40 am)

Max Edelson (Virginia): The “New Map of Empire” Project: Enhancing Cartography Scholarship with Dynamic Online Collections

Joseph Hurley (Georgia State): Visualizing Neighborhood Change: The Georgia State University Library Digital Map Collection, “Planning Atlanta: A New City in the Making, 1950s – 1980s”

Michael Page (Emory): Modeling the History of the City using Library Resources

Marcel A Fortin (Toronto) The Don Valley Historical Mapping Project

John Cloud (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration): Starting from Hassler’s Primary Triangle: The survey of the coast in “New York Bay and Harbor and the Environs” as the foundation for geo-spatial data for North America

(2) ENABLING ACCESS (12.40 – 2.20 pm)

Julie Sweetkind-Singer (Stanford): Digital Philanthropy: Increasing Access through Donor Collaboration

Matt Knutzen (New York Public Library): Open Historical Map

Bonnie Burns (Harvard) OpenGeoportal: A Collaborative Geographic Search Tool

Meredith Westington/Keith Bridge (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration): The Value of a Bounding Box: Moving Historical Charts beyond the Image Browser

Gregory J Allord (US Geological Survey): USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection: Converting and Integrating lithographic maps into The National Map

(3) EXTRACTING AND DEFINING FEATURES (2.40 – 4.20 pm)

James Burt (US Geological Survey): Efficient Geo-referencing of Small-scale Scanned Map Images

Richard Marciano (North Carolina): Connecting People, Past, and Place: exploring semi-automated extraction of text and polygons from common historic sources

Andrea White (University of New Orleans) Creating an Archaeological Sensitivity Model for New Orleans using Historic Maps and Historical GIS

Anne Leonard (New York City College of Technology) Using old maps and new methods to discover the early chemical and petroleum industries of Newtown Creek

Stuart Macdonald (University of Edinburgh) Addressing History – Crowdsourcing the Past

(4) DIGITAL GAZETTEERS (4.40 – 5.40 pm)

Merrick Berman (Harvard) Historical Gazetteer Development and Integration: CHGIS, Regnum Francorum, and GeoNames

Raj Singh (Open Geospatial Consortium) Establishing a Global Data Sharing Framework for Place Names

Ashley Holt (National Geospatial intelligence Agency) Gazetteer representation of place name usage

(5) KEYNOTE: FINDING AND REFERENCING OLD MAPS ONLINE (6 – 7 pm)

This joint presentation will demonstrate and launch a new global search portal for digitised historical maps: Old Maps Online

Presenters:
David Rumsey (Cartography Associates)
Humphrey Southall (Univ of Portsmouth – Great Britain Historical GIS)
Petr Pridal (Klokan Technologies)

Note that the  New York Public Library building closes at 6pm. Those wishing to attend this session must arrive by 5:45pm to be admitted to the building. The keynote is followed by a reception for the speakers at the workshop and other invited guests.

Session Organizers:
Humphrey Southall (GB Historical GIS, University of Portsmouth)
Matt Knutzen (New York Public Library)
Lex Berman (Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University)

Sponsors:
New York Public Library
Cartography Associates
Old Maps Online

They have actually been in the underlying database for some months, and were the basis for summary data by occupational “Order”. The reason why they were not visible is that there are over four hundred different occupational categories, and our software for handling statistical “themes” is programmed to ignore data which cannot sensibly be graphed.

What we have now done is made the data accessible under the “Census Reports” option for each parish. You still cannot see a graph, but you do get a tabulation.

This is a bit of a cheat, as unlike all our other census data these numbers never appeared in a published census report. They were computed for us some years ago by the History Data Service at the University of Essex, from the individual-level data from the census Enumerators’ Books as computerised by an army of family historians coordinated by the Genealogical Society of Utah. Data for Scotland were not available.

However, it is not completely a cheat as, firstly, the data we are presenting for Registration Counties in our listing of table 10, “Occupations of Males and Females in the Division and its Registration Counties” from the 1881 report titled Tables: Ages, Condition as to Marriage, Occupations and Birthplaces of people are exactly what they say they are. For example, here are the data for Herefordshire:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/table_page.jsp?tab_id=EW1881AGE_M10&u_id=10134778&show=DB&min_c=1&max_c=2

However, if you go to the original report you will find that the only data for sub-county units in table 10 are for Urban Sanitary Districts with populations over 50,000. We have made it possible to drill down from the Registration Counties to Registration Districts, then to Registration sub-Districts and finally to Civil Parishes by using data from the Enumerators’ Books. Note that a great deal of work was done at Essex to group the roughly half million character strings defining occupations in the data supplied by the Genealogical Society of Utah into the 400-odd detailed categories used in the published table, so this is not much of a cheat at all. One limitation to the data we have added is that they exclude persons under 15 or over 65.

Although the data list “categories” not the actual occupations given by respondents, they are often very specific, such as “Toll Collector, Turnpike Gate Keeper” or “Painter, Glazier”. Here for example are the data for the parish of Selbourne, Hampshire:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/table_page.jsp?tab_id=EW1881AGE_M10&u_id=10202036&show=DB

Summarising, the way you reach these data is:

• Search by place name from our home page.
• Once you reach the relevant “place page”, click on “Units and statistics” in the sidebar on the left.
• Select and click on a unit whose suffix includes “CP”, such as “AP/CP” or “Ch/CP” (meaning a unit that was originally a Chapelry). The data may also be available for units with status “RegD” or “SubD”.
• From the unit’s home page, click on “Census Reports”, which should be the last option in the sidebar.
• You then get a list of available tables in date order. For 1881, click on “10: Occupations of Males and Females in the Division and its Registration Counties”, and you should get the listing.

At last year’s meeting project director Humphrey Southall presented about A Vision of Britain through Time. This year will see a presentation and demonstration of the new Old Maps Online website being launched on 29th February. There will also be a presentation by another member of the steering group for that project, Kimberly Kowal of the British Library, who will speak about their map crowd-sourcing project.

Attendance is free but places are limited. See their website for details on how to book a place.

It is being held at the Chancellors’ Hall, University of London Senate House, on Wednesday 29th February.

ATTENDANCE IS FREE BUT NUMBERS ARE LIMITED so please contact Ruth Roberts at the National Archives for an invitation.

PROGRAMME:

9:30am ­ 9:50am: Coffee and registration

9:50am ­ 10:00am: Welcome by Colin Jones (Royal Historical Society)

10:00am ­ 10:30am: Introduction by Humphrey Southall (GBH GIS/Portsmouth),
providing an overview of the field.

10:30am ­ 11:45pm: Panel 1: SOURCES:
Three 15 minute presentations reviewing some of the sources available in
developing historical geographic information systems, followed by an open
discussion:

Kimberley Kowal (British Library)
Dominic Fontana (Portsmouth University)
Andrew Hudson-Smith (CASA/UCL, Tales of Things: Electronic Memory project)

11:45am ­ 12:00pm: New approaches and technologies at The National Archives by David Thomas

12:00pm ­ 12:45pm: LUNCH

12:45pm ­ 2:00pm: Panel 2: APPLICATIONS/RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
Three 15 minute presentations considering relevant research questions and applications, followed by an open discussion:

Ian Gregory (Liverpool University)
Richard Coates (University of the West of England)
Nigel Walford (Kingston University).

2:00pm ­ 3:15pm: Panel 3: AUDIENCES AND ENGAGEMENT:
Three 15 minute presentations on achieving wider public impact, followed by an open discussion:

Caroline Kimbell (The National Archives)
Bruce Gittings (Edinburgh University)
Nick Stanhope (HistoryPin).

3:15pm ­ 3:45pm: TEA BREAK

3:45pm ­ 4:45pm: Keynote speech: Place and the politics of the past by
Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire)

4:45pm ­ 5:00pm: Closing comments

Remember, attendance is free but numbers are limited so you MUST contact the National Archives for an invitation.

More about Chancellors Hall

So how are we doing with this task?

You will see that even after all this work more than half the descriptive entries are not linked to places, so don’t assume you can’t find somewhere in our system until you have directly searched our descriptive gazetteers via the relevant expert search form:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/descriptions

A lot of the “un-placed” entries are for physical or linear features, like mountains, rivers and railway lines. However, many are simply for small settlements. For example, there are 9,177 un-placed Imperial Gazetteer entries of two hundred characters or less, which have so far not been visually inspected. Of these, 492 are for “a village”, 1,174 for “a township” and 3,396 for “a hamlet”.

A few more tips:

• The relative locations given in these entries, such as “six miles north-west of Newtown”, often seem to describe the main settlement of the parish containing a township or hamlet, not the place being described. This is one of the reasons why locating some of the Welsh townships is proving so hard.
• Where descriptive entries give locations that are just plain wrong, Bartholomew and the Imperial Gazetteer often seem to make the same mistake. For example, they both locate Ynysawdre 3 miles south of Bridgend in Glamorgan when it was 3 miles north. There is a strong suspicion that the various gazetteers copied much material from one another, including their errors. NB our aim is always to provide an accurate transcription of what the historical writer said, not to correct any errors they made.
• Most settlements end up with two linked gazetteer entries, one from Bartholomew and the other from the Imperial Gazetteer or, in Scotland, Groome. Our system then selects the entry with the most appropriate length to appear on the main page for each place, below the map. Our rules for selecting the entry are a little complex, but what this means in practice is that if the entry on the main page is from Groome or the Imperial you will not find much additional information on the “place writing” page, unless it is a really big place with lots of entries, or if there are linked references from travel writers. However, if the entry on the main page is from Bartholomew it is very likely there will be a more detailed entry linked from “place writing”.
• Some of those linked entries can be very long. For example, the Groome gazetteer entry for Edinburgh contains well over 100,000 words — the length of a substantial book.

Adding places

Adding “places” is not about extending our content, but about linking together existing content and making it easier to find: associating locations, generally settlements, on our historical maps with administrative units named after them, and with entries about them in our descriptive gazetteers.

So what is this batch about?

Firstly, it means that almost all ecclesiastical parishes have been placed, the only exceptions now being within the City of London (and that is to avoid overloading the listing). This adds quite a few villages, many suburbs — and what look like “places” in the middle of nowhere, which are generally housing estates from the 1950s and 1960s which made it into Youngs’ listing of parishes:

 http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=23775

Secondly, we have checked every descriptive gazetteer entry of over 200 characters length that was not already linked to a place, and if it was for any kind of settlement we have defined it as a place. That length limit is obviously arbitrary, but shorter entries generally give just a name and a location with only minimal descriptions, like ‘a hamlet’.

We have also defined a few new “places” which are not really populated places, but had interesting descriptive entries, such as:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=25752

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=24489

One limitation to this is that all we hold as a location for each place is a point coordinate, so we can not really include features like railway lines or rivers. We do have some control over what map is displayed on each “place page”, so for districts like “Swaledale” we can specify a map showing a big area — but internally it is still a point:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=24722

Adding names

As explained previously, as we link administrative units, descriptive gazetteer entries and references in travel writing together to define places, all the geographical names we harvest from those sources becomes names of the place. One result is that searching using any of those names will take you to the relevant place page.

However, there is another way we make use of all the names we hold for places, which is in ranking search results so that we list the most (hopefully) relevant place first: for example, if you search our system for “Newport”, grouping by “place” and counting the frequency of the names, you get:

select p.g_place, p.g_name, p.g_container, count(n.g_name) as freq
from g_place p, g_name n
where p.g_place=n.g_place and n.g_name='NEWPORT'
group by p.g_place, p.g_name, p.g_container order by freq desc;

g_place |     g_name      |   g_container   | freq
 -------+-----------------+-----------------+------
    630 | NEWPORT         | SHROPSHIRE      |   13
    177 | NEWPORT         | HAMPSHIRE       |   12
   1121 | NEWPORT         | MONMOUTHSHIRE   |   12
    294 | NEWPORT PAGNELL | BUCKINGHAMSHIRE |    8
   6839 | NEWPORT         | ESSEX           |    8
   8390 | NEWPORT         | PEMBROKESHIRE   |    4
  21030 | NEWPORT         | DEVON           |    4
  13788 | WALLINGFEN      | EAST RIDING     |    4
  21031 | NEWPORT         | SOMERSET        |    3
  21029 | NEWPORT         | CORNWALL        |    3
  17409 | NEWPORT ON TAY  | FIFE            |    3
  25079 | NEWPORT         | NORTH RIDING    |    2

Almost exactly the same query lies behind our home page searching, it is just that there you do not see the count. The reason why we hold the name “Newport” thirteen times for the place in Shropshire is mostly because of all the administrative units named after it, but also because of a couple of references from descriptive gazetteers. You can see the details here:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_names.jsp?p_id=630

We have actually made a small change to how the system works, so we are now including names from the descriptive gazetteers even where they match the “standard name”. This should make the relevance ranking work a little better.

We have now defined 21,443 places, and they have 127,073 names in the names table associated with them.

As always, there are a couple of related changes planned. Firstly, there are now an embarrassingly large number of names in the names table whose source is defined simply as “GBHGIS”. In most cases, these are in fact names that appear on the map extracts on our place pages, it is just that we currently have no mechanism for recording links between names and map images. Secondly, it is now time to revisit the travel writing collection, because a lot of additional places have been defined but references to these in the travel writers have not been harvested.

Humphrey Southall followed the meeting by doing a presentation to British Library staff about the issues around and importance of short, stable web addresses for citation purposes.

The day was arranged by the NeDiMAH Working Group 1: Space & Time and focused on conceptual approaches to time and space. It involved a number of presentations followed by group and panel discussions, Humphrey Southall presented a paper “What are places?“.

The following day Humphrey also participated in group work at the PELAGIOS 2 workshop, which combines a number of interenational research groups and projects looking to expose linked data for the ancient world. The workshop focused on the more practical aspects of providing linked data through shared entity URIs.

NeDiMAH webpages are here: http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/humanities-sch/current-esf-research-networking-programmes-in-humanities/nedimah.html

NeDiMAH Working Group 1: Space and Time webpages are here: http://spacetimewg.pbworks.com/

PELAGIOS blog pages are here: http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/