Disambiguation in the Humanities workshop

Last week we were invited to Poland to attend an event organised by the ‘People, Places and Events: Innovative Spatial Humanities Research to support Interpretation and Explanation’ project being run through the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw. The workshop “Places and locations. Historical research challenges for present-day digital disambiguations” was held on the top floor of the beautifully re-purposed old library building where we could see the snow falling outside through the skylights.

Along with a specially invited group of expert scholars from Poland, Germany and beyond we had a day and a half of small and full group discussion around the problems of disambiguation when working with mostly digitised versions of historical documents, in particular with regards to place names. GBHGIS Project director Humphrey Southall also did a presentation on different levels of ambiguity and the approaches that can be used when trying to disambiguate them. The outcomes from the workshop will feed into a collaborative output the participants are working on together. More details on that when we’re further along next year.

Hot off the press – new land-use article published

Always a good start to the week when you get a Monday morning email to say an article has just been published. We’ve been collaborating on this one for some time, so thanks to the lead authors Andrew Suggitt (Northumbria University) and Alistair Auffret (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) for getting it over the line.

The article looks at land use change over 75 years starting from the maps created by the Land Utilisation Survey conducted by Sir L. Dudley Stamp in the 1930s. It combined land use change in semi-natural grassland with climate change data to examine changes in population distributions of butterflies, birds, moths and plants across Britain.

It has been published as Open Access so you can read it without restriction:

Suggitt, A.J., Wheatley, C.J., Aucott, P., Beale, C.M., Fox, R., Hill, J.K., Isaac, N.J.B., Martay, B., Southall, H., Thomas, C.D., Walker, K.J. & Auffret, A.G.. Linking climate warming and land conversion to species’ range changes across Great Britain. Nature Communications 14, 6759 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42475-0

Planned maintenance: Tuesday 3rd October

Our website, A Vision of Britain through Time, will be down for maintenance next Tuesday (3rd October). We aim to complete the work before the end of the day. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Planned maintenance: Thursday 23rd February

Our website, A Vision of Britain through Time, will be unavailable for a significant portion of today (23rd February) as we complete some essential works. We aim to complete the work by the end of the day. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

* Update 3:20pm 23/02/2023 * The maintenance is now complete and the site is live again.

Newly released occupation and industry data at the UK Data Service

As previous indicated we’re overhauling our historical statistics held at the UK Data Service. Each dataset is released under new easier access licence conditions (CC-BY-SA), complementing the download options on our own Vision of Britain site. We’ve done more cleaning, where possible added our gazetteer ID numbers to ease dataset matching and added lots of extra data and tables. To find our data search for ‘gbhd’ in the UK Data Service catalogue: https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/find-data/. The latest material we’ve added all relate to occupation and industry from the Census.

SN 4559: We’ve re-released the very large collection of occupation tables adding extra data for 1861 and 1911 for England and Wales and Scottish data for 1861, 1881, 1911 and 1951.

SN 9020: We’ve added a new category for Industry tables which cover England, Wales and Scotland in 1931, 1951 and 1971. These are about the workplace itself, so the business of the employer rather than individual jobs.

SN 3706 has been permanently embargoed as all the material in its tables are now held within tables in the datasets above. The only table that wasn’t, “empl_1961_gb”, is now included in SN 4559.

Planned maintenance: Thursday 10th November

Our website, A Vision of Britain through Time, will be completely unavailable from 9 am today (10th November) as we complete some essential works. We aim to complete the work by the end of the day. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

* Update 2:30pm 10/11/2022 * The maintenance is now complete and the site is live again.

New releases of our data at the UK Data Service

We’ve been overhauling our historical statistics held at the UK Data Service, hence the recent embargo of our data held there. When each dataset is ready it’ll be released under new easier access licence conditions (CC-BY-SA), complementing the download options on our own Vision of Britain site. We’ve done more cleaning, where possible added our gazetteer ID numbers to ease dataset matching and added lots of extra data and tables. Please bear with us, the process is on-going but takes a while as some tables are easier than others to update. To find our data search for ‘gbhd’ in the UK Data Service catalogue: https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/find-data/.

So far the re-released datasets include:

• SN 4552: Mid-twentieth century Census education tables. For England and Wales the dataset was expanded from just 1951 to include 1961, but it also now includes Scotland 1951-61
• SN 4561: Census data for social class and socio-economic groups. This release covers England and Wales 1931-1971 as before, but now also includes Scotland 1951-1971
• SN 4557: The single table on marital status in 1931 in Scotland which now includes the rows for Aberdeen that were missing from the previous release!
• SN 4554: Housing density tables for England and Wales have had 1911 and 1951 added to the existing 1901 to 1971 range.
• SN 4553: Housing amenities tables (formerly called housing conditions), still cover 1951 to 1971 for England and Wales, but now also include Scotland for the same dates.

There are also completely new datasets which include:

• SN 8960: A new Census dataset for housing density in Scotland for 1911 to 1971, but excluding 1921
• SN 8945: An 1851 British education data which is unusual as it’s from a special volume which was not repeated in the other nineteenth century Censuses
• SN 8995: A new Census category, housing tenure. It just covers 1961, but has tables for both England and Wales and for Scotland
• SN 8994: A new deposit of the Strike Register 1903-1938 for every fifth year (no gazetteer IDs have been included in this table).

Some of our datasets held at the UK Data Service have not had their content updated, however we have re-released them with more open licence conditions. These include:

• SN 4558: Census migration tables 1851-1951
• SN 4564: wage statistics for towns 1845-1906
• SN 4565: hours of work statistics for 1900-1913
• SN 4565: small debt statistics, 1847-1938
• SN 4569: trade union statistics, 1851-1918.

Finally we discovered there must have been some confusion about versions at some point in the past. We found some of the datasets from our original deposit had been replaced with newer versions of the same data but in different Data Service study numbers. To eliminate this duplication and make it clearer to Data Service users which is the most up-to-date versions of the data they should be using we’ve removed access to the really old versions which will remain embargoed permanently. Instead, pressing the “Access data” button will give a documentation page containing a hyperlink to the newer version of the same material in the catalogue. These include:

• old set SN3710 replaced by SN4564 and SN4565
• old set SN3712 replaced by SN4569
• old set SN3714 replaced by SN4568.

We’ll keep this blog and Twitter (@gbhgis) updated as and when other new releases happen.

Planned maintenance: Tuesday 11th January

Advance notice that our website, A Vision of Britain through Time, will be completely unavailable from 9 am tomorrow (Tuesday 11th January) as we complete some essential works. We aim to complete the work by the end of the day. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Planned downtime: Friday 19th November

Advance notice that our website, A Vision of Britain through Time, will be completely unavailable from 9 am on Friday 19th November as we complete some essential works. We aim to complete the work by the end of the day. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Website issues

Apologies if you have had trouble accessing our main website A Vision of Britain through Time in the last few days. We know there is a problem and we are trying to fix it.

We hope to get normal service resumed as soon as possible.

* Update 26/07/2021 * – the website is now back up, thank-you for your patience