Frameworks and tools for statistical big data in the humanities
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Portsmouth
Department Name: Geography
Abstract
Over the last forty or so years, data archives in most advanced countries have assembled very large collections of statistics, including historical data computerised by academic projects. However, these are almost all collections of DATASETS, mostly organised essentially as tables, and data archive catalogues describe each dataset only as a whole, while the detailed structure of the rows and columns is usually described only in highly variable documentation from the original creators. This makes it quite impossible to analyse the history of the UK as a whole by downloading the contents of the UK Data Archive as a whole; and archive search interfaces are designed for social scientists wanting to download datasets for detailed statistical analysis, not for humanists -- or the general public -- wanting answers to specific questions such as "how many domestic servants were there in Bath in 1841?". Even once you find the number you want, how exactly do you cite it?
Two big statistical database projects take a different approach. Firstly, the Great Britain Historical (GBH) GIS, accessed via the Vision of Britain web site, holds 14,099,469 DATA VALUES, covering most aspects of Britain's demographic, economic, social and political history over the last 200 years, each on a separate row of just one table, and each with information on date, geographical area covered and subject matter. Area and subject are recorded through linkage to formal ontologies -- hierarchical lists -- the former linking to computerised boundaries for the reporting units, so data can be both graphed as time series and mapped. Secondly, the US National Science Foundation have funded the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA), led by the University of Pittsburgh and running from January 2013 until at least December 2015, to assemble historical statistics for the whole world since 1600 by creating an online infrastructure enabling contributors worldwide to insert their data into an information architecture modelled on the GBH GIS. Such "crowd-sourcing" using specialists is the only way really big historical data structures can be created.
The proposed research would directly fund the architect of the GBH GIS to play a larger role within CHIA, and recruit British and European contributors. However, the main aim here is not to make either the GBH GIS or the CHIA system even bigger, but to make it easier for humanists and the general public to find and work with the contents. This is a relatively small project with three main outputs. Firstly, a better statistical thesaurus or topic ontology -- if you like, a Dewey Decimal Classification for numbers -- providing a shared language for contributors and users. This will be based on an existing thesaurus developed by social scientists but with some broader headings added to help non-specialists get started, and many more variant terms added, enabling users to find out about "jobs" as well as "occupations". Secondly, a user-friendly interface for finding not "datasets" but particular numbers: specifying the area covered by clicking on a map, the period via a graphical timeline, and the topic by selecting progressively narrower terms within the "domain ontology". Where possible, it will let users drill down from simple totals to more detailed data. Thirdly, a separate interface for computers, not people, providing data values either individually or as a long stream, each with complete information about the date, area and topic. One purpose is simply to provide each data value with its own enduring web address (a "Uniform Resource Identifier"), enabling it to be cited with absolute precision and confidence. However, this "data feed" could be used by search engines, like Google or Bing, to index our content and provide new forms of access; or it could be linked to large scale analytic engines, enabling other researchers to actually analyse the history of Britain or the world as a whole".
Two big statistical database projects take a different approach. Firstly, the Great Britain Historical (GBH) GIS, accessed via the Vision of Britain web site, holds 14,099,469 DATA VALUES, covering most aspects of Britain's demographic, economic, social and political history over the last 200 years, each on a separate row of just one table, and each with information on date, geographical area covered and subject matter. Area and subject are recorded through linkage to formal ontologies -- hierarchical lists -- the former linking to computerised boundaries for the reporting units, so data can be both graphed as time series and mapped. Secondly, the US National Science Foundation have funded the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA), led by the University of Pittsburgh and running from January 2013 until at least December 2015, to assemble historical statistics for the whole world since 1600 by creating an online infrastructure enabling contributors worldwide to insert their data into an information architecture modelled on the GBH GIS. Such "crowd-sourcing" using specialists is the only way really big historical data structures can be created.
The proposed research would directly fund the architect of the GBH GIS to play a larger role within CHIA, and recruit British and European contributors. However, the main aim here is not to make either the GBH GIS or the CHIA system even bigger, but to make it easier for humanists and the general public to find and work with the contents. This is a relatively small project with three main outputs. Firstly, a better statistical thesaurus or topic ontology -- if you like, a Dewey Decimal Classification for numbers -- providing a shared language for contributors and users. This will be based on an existing thesaurus developed by social scientists but with some broader headings added to help non-specialists get started, and many more variant terms added, enabling users to find out about "jobs" as well as "occupations". Secondly, a user-friendly interface for finding not "datasets" but particular numbers: specifying the area covered by clicking on a map, the period via a graphical timeline, and the topic by selecting progressively narrower terms within the "domain ontology". Where possible, it will let users drill down from simple totals to more detailed data. Thirdly, a separate interface for computers, not people, providing data values either individually or as a long stream, each with complete information about the date, area and topic. One purpose is simply to provide each data value with its own enduring web address (a "Uniform Resource Identifier"), enabling it to be cited with absolute precision and confidence. However, this "data feed" could be used by search engines, like Google or Bing, to index our content and provide new forms of access; or it could be linked to large scale analytic engines, enabling other researchers to actually analyse the history of Britain or the world as a whole".
Planned Impact
The project will make develop methods making individual statistics -- not vast lumps of data -- easier to find, and use these methods to provide better access within two particular very large collections of mainstream historical statistics: the Great Britain Historical GIS, covering our changing population, economy, society and politics over the last two centuries, not just nationally but for each district and town; and a large new database for world history already being built by the US-led Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA), on similar principles to the GBH GIS. The end result will be a system that answers a great many straightforward questions, such as "what was the population of Bristol in 1881", but allows users to drill down into steadily greater detail.
There is obviously a large need for such systems from very broad academic and non-academic audiences, for example from journalists, schools and everyone writing interpretative local histories. This need is steadily growing as the available data stores get ever bigger, but is almost completely unmet: specialist data archives are focused on helping social scientists find and download large datasets; the websites of national statistical offices usually provide a small selection of pre-selected "key statistics" on conventional pages, and then similar download systems to the archives; and mainstream search engines have developed specialised search engines for almost every kind of digital content except numbers. Simple Google searches for statistics most often lead to Wikipedia or commercial sites of doubtful provenance -- except for some hyper-local UK population queries, which already lead to pages deep within our Vision of Britain site.
During 2014 we will be working with US and other partners to build CHIA as a very broad collaboration, recruiting additional online contributors worldwide, and not limited to academics: this is the only way to assemble a really large integrated body of historical data going back pre-c.1950, but also gets us started on having a high profile with potential users. In 2015 publicity for the new interfaces, combining well-chosen launch events, press releases and social media, will further raise our profile and bring users to our own search interface. Even so, the larger impact will be through adding semantic structure and a computer-to-computer access system to our statistical databases, enabling mainstream search 1,239,767 engines to answer detailed statistical questions by leading users to the particular numbers they need: Google finds those population pages deep within our existing system because it is built around very formal geographical hierarchies so every page can be indexed, and with a better hierachy of statistical topics a wider range of statistical themes will be equally findable.
Our existing web site, A Vision of Britain through Time, had 1,239,767 different visitors during the first six moths of 2013 and, as our REF Impact Case Study shows, is widely used by archivists, by local authority planners, by family historians -- even by film companies. This was achieved partly through a high profile launch, but mainly through focusing on online "findability": two-thirds of those visitors arrived via search engines, those from Google alone using 407,576 different search terms. Only a "big data" system could answer so many different questions, and this shows how large an audience there is for historical information. The challenge is not to get a mass audience interested but to enable them to find what they need. We are already far better at this than most academic online projects, but this project will enable us to both further improve access to our British content and apply our expertise to the larger global resource being built by international collaboration around CHIA.
There is obviously a large need for such systems from very broad academic and non-academic audiences, for example from journalists, schools and everyone writing interpretative local histories. This need is steadily growing as the available data stores get ever bigger, but is almost completely unmet: specialist data archives are focused on helping social scientists find and download large datasets; the websites of national statistical offices usually provide a small selection of pre-selected "key statistics" on conventional pages, and then similar download systems to the archives; and mainstream search engines have developed specialised search engines for almost every kind of digital content except numbers. Simple Google searches for statistics most often lead to Wikipedia or commercial sites of doubtful provenance -- except for some hyper-local UK population queries, which already lead to pages deep within our Vision of Britain site.
During 2014 we will be working with US and other partners to build CHIA as a very broad collaboration, recruiting additional online contributors worldwide, and not limited to academics: this is the only way to assemble a really large integrated body of historical data going back pre-c.1950, but also gets us started on having a high profile with potential users. In 2015 publicity for the new interfaces, combining well-chosen launch events, press releases and social media, will further raise our profile and bring users to our own search interface. Even so, the larger impact will be through adding semantic structure and a computer-to-computer access system to our statistical databases, enabling mainstream search 1,239,767 engines to answer detailed statistical questions by leading users to the particular numbers they need: Google finds those population pages deep within our existing system because it is built around very formal geographical hierarchies so every page can be indexed, and with a better hierachy of statistical topics a wider range of statistical themes will be equally findable.
Our existing web site, A Vision of Britain through Time, had 1,239,767 different visitors during the first six moths of 2013 and, as our REF Impact Case Study shows, is widely used by archivists, by local authority planners, by family historians -- even by film companies. This was achieved partly through a high profile launch, but mainly through focusing on online "findability": two-thirds of those visitors arrived via search engines, those from Google alone using 407,576 different search terms. Only a "big data" system could answer so many different questions, and this shows how large an audience there is for historical information. The challenge is not to get a mass audience interested but to enable them to find what they need. We are already far better at this than most academic online projects, but this project will enable us to both further improve access to our British content and apply our expertise to the larger global resource being built by international collaboration around CHIA.
Organisations
- University of Portsmouth (Lead Research Organisation)
- Free UK Genealogy (Collaboration)
- Boston University (Collaboration)
- Michigan State University (Collaboration)
- HARVARD UNIVERSITY (Collaboration)
- The Open University (Collaboration)
- University of Pittsburgh (Collaboration)
- Wikimedia Deutschland (Collaboration)
- University of California, Merced (Collaboration)
- Austrian Institute of Technology (Collaboration)
- UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON (Collaboration)
Publications
Aucott P
(2019)
Citizen science through old maps: Volunteer motivations in the GB1900 gazetteer-building project
in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History
Southall H
(2018)
Comprehensive Geographic Information Systems
Southall H
(2019)
Expressing History through a Geo-Spatial Ontology
in ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
Southall H R
(2017)
GB1900 - Computerising ALL the place-names of Britain
in Local History News: Magazine of the British Association for Local History
Southall H
(2017)
GB1900: Engaging the Public in Very Large Scale Gazetteer Construction from the Ordnance Survey "County Series" 1:10,560 Mapping of Great Britain
in Journal of Map & Geography Libraries
Southall HR
(2016)
Historical Atlas
Aucott P
(2019)
Locating Past Places in Britain: Creating and Evaluating the GB1900 Gazetteer
in International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing
Ell P; Hughes L; Southall H
(2016)
Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers
Mostern R
(2016)
Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers
| Description | We already knew that Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology provides an organising framework for very large amounts of spatially located data, and that historical applications had created very large single-country systems, notably the US National Historical GIS (NHGIS) and the Great Britain Historical GIS (GBHGIS). However, the larger potential to combine information across national boundaries to analyse historical change at continental or global scale has been surprisingly little exploited. Arguably one of the barriers is technical: most historical GIS projects rely on off-the shelf commercial GIS software originally designed for use by utility companies and similar, consequently focusing strongly on locations and "feature typing" (pylons, transformers, etc, or for that matter castles) and lacking frameworks for organizing more abstract textual or statistical information. However, both the NHGIS and GBHGIS include frameworks for statistics while the GBHGIS also holds much text, especially travel writing. Attempts to build a European historical GIS began with a workshop we organized with partners in Florence in 2000 and included the QVIZ project where, working with the Estonian and Swedish national archives, we constructed a GIS covering our three countries in detail and the rest of Europe only in outline. However, attempts to integrate all or most of the national historical GISs mainly constructed by academics have foundered on the need to provide all national partners with substantial funding to secure their participation, when in most cases all that was really needed were their existing data sets: projects were too expensive or covered too small a part of Europe. Outside Europe few national historical GIS projects exist, but American academic researchers have built or are building historical GIS systems covering much of the world, and especially Asia, so a mainly US-based project would at least involve fewer national sensitivities. Having already achieved a high profile in the US via the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative and organizing sessions at the Social Science History conferences, we began seeking funding with US partners in 2009, initially working primarily with Harvard's Center for Geographic Analysis. The collaborative network evolved, and in 2012 the National Science Foundation funded the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA), now led by the University of Pittsburgh. The aim was to assemble a "world-historical database", primarily statistical, going back four centuries to 1600 and intended to be a true humanities Big Data structure. Obviously, born-digital data exist for only a fraction of that timespan, so with limited funds for new digitization the aim was to gather data not just from CHIA partners but through a web site into which any historical researcher could upload data, and within which the various uploads would be integrated into a single data set. Our existing British system provided a clear model for this integration process, but had always lacked a user-friendly "ingest system" for adding data. Unfortunately, CHIA did not employ any digital humanists at Pittsburgh, relying instead on computer science students whose Col*Fusion ingest system was never completed: CHIA has assembled relatively little data, and not really integrated it. One finding is that assembling humanities Big Data through on-line collaboration is hard, but is it impossible? One CHIA collaborator argues that the humanities, unlike the natural and social sciences, are "accustomed to solitary scholarship and well-established systems of peer-review publication in prestigious academic journals, [and] see less merit in alternative modes of publication that may not aid in their career advancement" (Mostern and Arksey, forthcoming). Certainly, most humanists do not accept datasets as publications, and pure altruism is too weak a motive, but our British experience is that many historians approach us offering data because they want it mapped, so a historical GIS naturally attracts data; but Col*Fusion lacked a mapping capability. Another strong motive for late career researchers is to see their life's work preserved and re-used. Once it was clear CHIA would not be creating the expected Big Data structure much of our original proposal became pointless. Very serious consideration was given to building our own ingest system, significant data modelling having been done while seeking to explain the approach to CHIA, and this may eventually happen. However, our development resources had never been intended to cover this, so we concentrated instead on creating a set of geographical resources which were genuinely global in scope, closely modelled on our existing British resource, but capable of being completed with the resources provided by the AHRC, plus some other smaller scale funding we already had and much assistance from collaborators. The result is PastPlace, the core of which turns content from Wikipedia via their Wikidata project into a systematic global gazetteer of "places", but adds to it historical place names from diverse sources, including data from the Pelagios project, and the beginnings of a systematic inventory of statistical reporting areas: very complete for Britain and Sweden, but also including information on all modern countries and many historical ones, both sovereign states and dependencies. Much effort has gone into making this easily accessible both to non-expert users, via a "web app" that adapts to phones and tablets, and to programs on other computers, via a special "Applications Programming Interface". ====================== March 2018 Addendum: The whole team funded by the AHRC grant remained in post until March 2017, funded mainly from royalty income plus some contract work, and continued to research themes related to the original proposal. That is discussed elsewhere in this return, but it is obviously problematic describing this further work as "the research funded on this grant". What should be noted here is that the CHIA project has never launched their crowd-sourcing system; the director of the CHIA project has now retired from the University of Pittsburgh, but has been relaced as Professor of World History by Professor Mostern, who led CHIA work at the University of California Merced and was also co-editor of the "Placing Names" book. She has argued in print that the whole CHIA agenda would never have worked, in an article titled "Don't Just Build It, They Probably Won't Come: Rethinking Data Sharing and the Social Life of Data in the Historical Quantitative Social Sciences" (Int. J. of Hum. & Arts Computing, 10.2 (2016), 205-224). However, as they never finished building "it" and never launched it, this judgement was premature: our own experience with crowd-sourcing in GB1900 was happier, creating a 2.6m item dataset. Now moving to analytic findings. ========== February 2019 addendum: We are now much more comfortable with presenting our work on the GB1900 project as an outcome from our work for the Big Data programne, but this also means that at this writing there has been a real big data set -- 2.55m text strings and coordinates -- for us to analyse and non-academic partners to work with for only seven months. We have published a detailed study, based on depth interviews and an online questionnaire, of our volunteers' motivation, showing that unlike traditional citizen science, much of the motivation lay in making specific connections to family and place. We are now working on analyses of the main dataset and have offered a paper to Digital Humanities 2019, so there will finally be a simple list of key findings. ============ March 2020 Addendum: Our own work in the last year has focused on using the raw GB1900 data as the basis for a dearchable gazetteer within the Vision of Britain system, work which also integrated the DEEP gazetteer derived from the reports of the English Place Name Survey. Meanwhile, publications by other academic researchers using GB1900 data have begun to appear, including a favourable comparison with the Geonames gazetteer by the Turing Instiute. Somewhat separately, Pelagios Commons have funded an API providing programatic access to our Administrative Unit Ontology. We also note the publication of "Data in Society", much of which takes a broadly humanistic approach to the rise of "Big Data", with Southall as one of its three editors. |
| Exploitation Route | The main data structures created by this project are designed around open data standards and are being made available under Creative Commons licensing. The main limitation is that the specific digital content created using the separate Higher Education Innovation Fund award from the University of Portsmouth is not being made freely available, but being used to provide the PastPlace web site with some unique features, so as to generate advertising income to ensure sustainability. |
| Sectors | Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3371140.3371143 |
| Description | At this writing (October 2015), major impacts have inevitably not yet appeared. However, we have a clear strategy for achieveing non-academic impact, primarily through archives and libraries: Southall has been a member of the steering committee of the UK Archives Discovery Network and the PastPlace system has been demonstrated at the annual Discovery Forum. Its use in archival information systems, via with the Linked Data API, has been discussed with the National Archives' Chief Information Officer and the Managing Director of Axiel UK, the dominat supplier of archive management softeware to UK local archives. The system has also been presented at the British Library and the New York Public Library, and we are currently collaborating with the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland on the GB1900 crowd-souced gazetteer-building project. All this said, we expect the main use of our work to be directly by the general public, via the PastPlace web site. Our existing Vision of Britain site had 1.66m unique visitors in 2014, PastPlace is designed to be a global resource with similar impact, and we have gone to considerable effort to create a system which works well on phones and tablets. ======================== Addendum revised February 2019: The above information remains valid, but more recent activity has been more focused on working directly with the public, and with less formal bodies. That includes work on the GB1900 crowd-sourced gazetteer, which was not directly funded by the AHRC but used AHRC resources from the Big Data programme, and had no other external funder: it is based on our realising that a very large crowd-sourcing project could be launched at minimal cost by combining software already developed by a Welsh consortium with digital historical mapping of the whole of Britain created by the National Library of Scotland. GB1900 ran from September 2016 to January 2018, recruited 1,200 volunteers who contributed over 5m. place-name transcriptions, so creating a genuinely "big data" geographical description of Britain circa 1900. The final dataset was launched, and made available for download under a Creative Commons license, in July 2018, following significant more manual cleaning. We have added the dataset and launch event to ResearchFish and included some specific impacts, but a fuller evaluation needs to wait until our 2020 submission; the project is forming the basis for an REF Impact Case Study, so we are systematically monitoring usage, but the sheer size of the dataset means developing uses takes significant time and this started only 6 months ago. ======================== Addendum March 2021: We have added information on twp longer term consequences from the GB1900 work: its incorporation into the "List of Historic Place Names of Wales" a statutory document, and its central role in the Ramblers' "Don't Lose Your Way" project, launched in 2020 and aimed at identifying "lost" historical rights of way. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2020 |
| Sector | Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Description | Preserving Welsh Historic Place Names |
| Geographic Reach | Local/Municipal/Regional |
| Policy Influence Type | Citation in other policy documents |
| Impact | Recognising the importance of historic place names to the history and culture of Wales, the Welsh Government included a provision for a statutory list of historic place names in the Historic Environment (Wales) Act 2016. In May 2017, the RCAHMW created the List of Historic Place Names of Wales: this contains 675,000 names of which 43% were contributed by 'Cymru1900' and 'GB1900'. This List has: (a) raised public awareness of the rich legacy of historic place in Wales: in one month alone (September 2019), 5,450 public users conducted 6,642 sessions on the website; (b) informed decisions on the management of the historic environment. Incorporation of the List into the 2016 Act mandated that local authority Planning and Street Naming and Numbering departments must use the List to review development proposals and recommend the use of Welsh names on properties and streets. Local Councils have readily complied (see, for example, instructions on property naming by Ceredigion, Powys and Gwynedd Councils) and Ceredigion Council specifically encourages homeowners applying to rename properties to retain historical Welsh names, even if the new suggested name is also in Welsh. |
| URL | https://business.senedd.wales/documents/s95024/RCAHMW%20paper.pdf |
| Description | University of Portsmouth Higher Education Innovation Fund |
| Amount | £33,429 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | HEIF 2011-15 |
| Organisation | Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2013 |
| End | 12/2015 |
| Title | Implementing PastPlace APIs on new server |
| Description | The APIs developed by the AHRC-funded project ran on a server computer originally installed in 2012. In January to March 2017, they were moved onto a new server bought in 2016, giving them a substantially extended life. This was the last piece of work done by Michael Stoner before leaving the university. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2017 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Moving the APIs to a new server in itself could not create any new impacts, but without it all further impacts would be blocked. At the time of writing (March 2017) there are a number of wider activities linked to the APIs: (1) work with Free UK Genealogy to further develop the APIs (which means that their chair, a professional software developer, now has a copy of our software in his development environment); (2) new contacts with the Royal Historical Society aimed at removing the largest copyright restriction on making our full information on historical administrative units fully accessible as Linked OPEN Data; (3) changes made by the Wikidata project enabling it to link to our API, by defining our identifiers as Wikidata properties. |
| URL | http://data.pastplace.org/search |
| Title | PastPlace DataCube API |
| Description | This Applications Programming Interface enables computer programs running on any internet-connected computer to access statistical data values in a self-documenting format following Open Linked Data principles and the specific recommendations of the W3C DataCube Vocabulary working group (http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-data-cube/). This was a commitment in the original proposal to the AHRC, although it was originally intended to extract data from an integrated resource to be constructed by the University of Pittsburgh and now accesses the existing British statistical database behind the Vision of Britain web site, which contains c. 14m diverse data values. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2015 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The system has been discussed with staff working on similar data feeds at the Office of National Statistics (ONS OpenAPI) and the UK Data Service's InFuse system, as well as being presented at the GIS Research UK Conference in April 2015. NB the URL below accesses the API, not a conventional web page. |
| URL | http://data.pastplace.org/datacube |
| Title | PastPlace Gazetteer API |
| Description | This Applications Programming Interface provides programmatic access to the PastPlace gazetteer database, allowing places to be searched for by name or by specifying the coordinates of a rectangle; one unusual feature is that the latter call will return the N-most important places within that rectangle, 'importance' being defined algorithimcally. Data are returned in a variety of formats: RDF-XML, RDF-Turtle, JSON and a simple XML format used by Open Street Map. It is implemented using Apache Jena. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This will not be widely used until the app provides user-friendly access to the API, but it has been used by our partners in Pelagios and at the China Historical GIS, as well as demonstrated to a variety of audiences including the UK Archives Discovery Network and Digital Humanities 2014. NB the URL below accesses the API, not a conventional web page, but if accessed without any parameters set it returns basic documentation. |
| URL | http://data.pastplace.org/search |
| Title | Digital Gazetteer of the World 1856 |
| Description | Separately listed to clarify funding: 'The Gazetteer of the World, or Dictionary of Geographical Knowledge' was published by Fullarton's of Edinburgh in 1856 and consists of c. 7 million words and c. 90,000 entries. It was scanned by Google Books and the text then automatically recognised, somewhat crudely to enable indexing by Google. We systematically extracted that text from Google Books, then obtained funding from the Higher Education Innovation Fund to employ undergraduates to clean the text, adding missing sections manually. The text was then loaded into our main database, divided up into entries and the place names extracted. We emphasise that HEIF funding was spent almost entirely on these students and on paying for professional web design for PastPlace, a small surplus being used to keep our developer in post after September 2015. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | The text of the gazetteer forms an integral part of the PastPlace gazetteer data structure, so no separate impact can be claimed. Note the published PastPlace API does not provide access to the gazetteer text, only to the place names systematically extracted from the text. This restriction is so that no-one else can exactly replicate the PastPlace web site/app, given that this is partly intended to generate income through advertising. Note that the Vision of Britain web site currently generates c. £20,000 per annum through advertising, which is why a credible case could be made for HEIF support. |
| Title | Digital International Map of the World |
| Description | The US National Science Foundation-funded 'Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis' project, to which our AHRC Big Data project as planned was very closely linked, was preceded by two Harvard-led applications under the NSF-AHRC joint scheme, in 2009 and 2010. These were more explicitly focused on building a global historical GIS, and any such system needs to geographically contextualise historical information partly by linking it to a sematic framework, such as the PastPlace AUO, but also simply by displaying it on top of a base map. A major limitation of many 'historical' web sites that display geographical information is that the base maps are entirely modern, from Google or less often Open Street Map. A relatively small part of our project was therefore to computerise the one set of 'old maps' that do cover the world's entire land surface. The International Map of the World was launched in 1913, initially coordinated by the Ordnance Survey and later by the United Nations, and aimed to map the world at 1:1 million scale in an internationally agreed format. Although it was never completed, various national mapping agencies continued to fill in gaps in the agreed grid. Many had already been scanned, notably by the University of Texas who supplied us with their archive quality versions, and additional sheets were scanned for us by Stanford University and the National Library of Scotland. Most of these maps were out of copyright or in the public domain, but we also obtained permission from the American Geographical Society to use and freely disseminate maps in which they held copyright, crucial to including Latin America. The final system is based on 720 1:1m sheets, 16 1:5m sheets and a world map at 1:30m, supporting different zoom levels. All scans have been cropped, geo-referenced, assembled into three mosaics at the different scales, re-divided into very large number of map tiles, and finally integrated into a Web Map Server implemented using Minnesota Map Server and GeoWebCache, providing a base mapping facility very similar to Google Maps, but 'historical'. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | The URL below is that of the PastPlace web app. We eventually decided that by default this would display our own rendering of Open Street Map data, as 1:1m is insufficiently detailed for displaying information for Britain or other densely populated areas, but clicking on the bottom icon within map display areas allows the IMW to be chosen instead. PastPlace accesses the IMW via an API supporting the Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Map Server standard, but our server lacks the capacity to provide this facility to all comers, so instead we are committed to making the final tile set available for download under a Creative Commons-Must Acknowledge (CC-BY) license. At the time of writing this is not available due to our server migration. We are also planning an article about this aspect of the project in collboration with Portsmouth colleague Alastair Pearson, who has already published on the history of the IMW. The original aim of the IMW was to provide a standard base map for the world, and through this component of our project this will finally be achieved. |
| URL | http://www.pastplace.org |
| Title | GB1900 Gazetteer |
| Description | The GB1900 gazetteer contains essentially all text strings appearing on the Ordnance Survey 2nd edition of the "County Series" six inch to one mile maps, covering the whole of Great Britain and published between 1888 and 1913, each accompanied by a point coordinate. The digital dataset was created by a large crowd-sourcing project involving 1,200 volunteers, working with the National Library of Scotland, who provided access to a digital mosaic of the maps, and the National Library of Wales and the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales, who supplied the software and incomplete data created by an earlier project limited to Wales. The software was enhanced and software hosted by the University of Portsmouth, who also did most of the volunteer recruitment and liaison. The dataset has been made available for download in three forms: a complete "raw dump" of all tables underlying the transcription system, excluding only volunteers personal details; a single table of "cleaned" data, created with additional input from volunteers, containing c. 2.55 million strings and coordinates, and an "abridged" dataset of c. 1.1 million rows from which repeating strings (e.g. "W." for well, and "F.P." for footpath) have been removed to create a more conventional gazetteer. The first dataset is offered under a CC-0 license, the other two under CC-BY-SA. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The data have assisted the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales in creating the statutory List of Historic Place Names, which developers are required to consult when, for example, naming new housing estates. We are working with the Ramblers Association to explore the use of the over 300,000 footpath markers in identifying historic footpaths missing from the modern statutory maps. In summer 2019 we will undertake a more systematic review of usage in the year following release. |
| URL | http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/#tabgb1900 |
| Title | PastPLace Gazetteer |
| Description | PastPlace is a global gazetteer which is historical in that it aims to record many different names for each 'place', and to document the provenance of each name: dates appear as parts of those provenances. The core of the gazetteer derives from Wikidata, and the whole system is tied together by the entity identifiers defined by the Wikidata project. The system also holds equivalent identifiers from the Geonames gazetteer, but that is an enumeration of 'features' so, for example, most English villages appear twice, as a 'populated place' and as a level 3 or 4 administrative unit, whereas Wikidata identifies them only once. This matters because within most historical sources such distinctions cannot be made. As well as these identifiers, Wikidata also provides all the names for each entity appearing in the different language editions of Wikipedia, so for that reason alone PastPlace holds an average of about ten names per place, versus about two names per feature in Geonames. The long term aim is to add very substantially to the number of historical names in PastPlace through crowd-sourcing from historical maps, and a pilot project, GB1900, is already under way in collaboration with the National Libraries of Wales and of Scotland. For now, PastPlace includes a limited number of sourced historical names from these sources: (1) Placenames appearing as headwords of the c. 90,000 articles in the 'Gazetteer of the World' (publication details). (2) British place-names extracted from the existing Vision of Britain system, sourced from statistical reports, four different 19th century gazetteers and a large collection of mainly 17th-19th century travel writing. (3) Some names extracted from various historical sources by the Pelagios project, e.g. John Mandeville, Mandeville's Voyages, 1357 - 1371 CE. This is more limited than we had hoped as Pelagios have not yet developed a systematic dump system, and supplied us with over 100 source-specific files. The current app simply lists names with their sources, but we are working on displaying names as tag clouds: clicking on a particular name variant in the cloud will list the attestations of that particular variant with its sources. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The URL below accesses the PastPlace web app, which accesses the database entirely via the PastPlace Linked Data API, listed as a separate output. This has taken a considerable time to develop as it uses responsive design principles, and the Facebook-developed React framework, to work will on mobile phones and tablets as well as computers. However, repeated dumps of the underlying PastPlace have been supplied to the Pelagios project using Turtle notation, starting in spring 2014, and the API has also been experimented with by the China Historical GIS team at Harvard (revealing problems with searching for Chinese characters!). |
| URL | http://www.pastplace.org |
| Title | PastPlace Administrative Unit Ontology |
| Description | This exists as an extension to our existing listing of British administrative units, but documents the sovereign states and dependent territories of the world. Historical information is currently largely limited to Europe and Africa. Detailed information on sub-national units is limited to Britain, Ireland, Sweden and Estonia, but the system was made ready for substantial additional information to be added by a postgraduate at Pittsburgh. It does document the assembly and break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the decolonisation process in Africa. It is an ontology rather than a simple gazetteer because it separately itemises entities, relationships, names and legal status, |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Although this is part of the same underlying database as the PastPlace gazetteer of 'places', the first version of the PastPlace web app does not access it, so we are including here the URL of a separate development interface which accesses only the AUO. We expect to release a second version of the PastPlace app by the end of June 2016 which will provide acccess to administrative unit information. At the time of writing, we are migrating systems between servers and the URL below may not work; if so, essentially the same system but with different branding can be accessed at: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/auo_viewer/index.jsp NB there is also an editing interface, which has been used by the Pittsburgh postgraduate and is available to others, but requires a log-in, at: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/EditingSystem/login.jsp |
| URL | http://www.pastplace.org/auo_viewer |
| Description | Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA) |
| Organisation | Boston University |
| Department | Department of Political Science |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Southall's collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, which actually started in 2010, was central to our project as originally planned, and its history is documented under 'Secondments and Placements', as during 2014 Southall spent two months in Pittsburgh working with the central CHIA team. He was involved in making the original case for NSF support, including briefing the NSF at a meeting in Pittsburgh in early 2011, and has been a member of the CHIA project's Executive Committee (attending physical meetings in May 2013 and September 2014). Our DataCube API was originally intended as a component of the CHIA dissemination system, as originally planned, as were two other original AHRC deliverables, the faceted search interface and the statistical domain ontology. The latter two deliverables were abandoned once it became clear that CHIA was not building a system in which they had a place. |
| Collaborator Contribution | It should be emphasised that much of the work of CHIA is assembling historical data sets through direct contact with particular research teams, which has proceeded as expected; but this is quite similar to the work of the UK History Data Service, which Southall was closely involved with between 1992 and 2008. The technical and organisational novelty of CHIA lay in the Pittsburgh-led work to assemble AND INTEGRATE historical data through online 'crowd-sourcing', primarily from academic researchers unconnected with the project: this was and is the only way that truly BIG data can be assembled for genuinely historical periods (much larger NSF funding has gone to the Terra Populous project (http://www.terrapop.org) which is building a global historical GIS but mainly limited to the 20th century). Unfortunately, the problems described elsewhere with the Col*Fusion system mean that CHIA has started crowd-sourcing much later in its award period than originally planned, far too late for our AHRC-funded project to work with the resulting CHIA data structure; and it has abandoned the original vision of data integration. Some direct financial assistance was provided by the University of Pittsburgh to Portsmouth, partly for travel but also helping fund early software development on PastPlace. |
| Impact | One direct collaborative output should be noted, which predated AHRC and NSF funding but helped make the case: Southall, H, Manning, P., Berman, M., Gerring, J. and Bol, P. (2011) Understanding global change: how best to organize information? Working Paper. National Science Foundation, Arlington. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA) |
| Organisation | Harvard University |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Southall's collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, which actually started in 2010, was central to our project as originally planned, and its history is documented under 'Secondments and Placements', as during 2014 Southall spent two months in Pittsburgh working with the central CHIA team. He was involved in making the original case for NSF support, including briefing the NSF at a meeting in Pittsburgh in early 2011, and has been a member of the CHIA project's Executive Committee (attending physical meetings in May 2013 and September 2014). Our DataCube API was originally intended as a component of the CHIA dissemination system, as originally planned, as were two other original AHRC deliverables, the faceted search interface and the statistical domain ontology. The latter two deliverables were abandoned once it became clear that CHIA was not building a system in which they had a place. |
| Collaborator Contribution | It should be emphasised that much of the work of CHIA is assembling historical data sets through direct contact with particular research teams, which has proceeded as expected; but this is quite similar to the work of the UK History Data Service, which Southall was closely involved with between 1992 and 2008. The technical and organisational novelty of CHIA lay in the Pittsburgh-led work to assemble AND INTEGRATE historical data through online 'crowd-sourcing', primarily from academic researchers unconnected with the project: this was and is the only way that truly BIG data can be assembled for genuinely historical periods (much larger NSF funding has gone to the Terra Populous project (http://www.terrapop.org) which is building a global historical GIS but mainly limited to the 20th century). Unfortunately, the problems described elsewhere with the Col*Fusion system mean that CHIA has started crowd-sourcing much later in its award period than originally planned, far too late for our AHRC-funded project to work with the resulting CHIA data structure; and it has abandoned the original vision of data integration. Some direct financial assistance was provided by the University of Pittsburgh to Portsmouth, partly for travel but also helping fund early software development on PastPlace. |
| Impact | One direct collaborative output should be noted, which predated AHRC and NSF funding but helped make the case: Southall, H, Manning, P., Berman, M., Gerring, J. and Bol, P. (2011) Understanding global change: how best to organize information? Working Paper. National Science Foundation, Arlington. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA) |
| Organisation | Michigan State University |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Southall's collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, which actually started in 2010, was central to our project as originally planned, and its history is documented under 'Secondments and Placements', as during 2014 Southall spent two months in Pittsburgh working with the central CHIA team. He was involved in making the original case for NSF support, including briefing the NSF at a meeting in Pittsburgh in early 2011, and has been a member of the CHIA project's Executive Committee (attending physical meetings in May 2013 and September 2014). Our DataCube API was originally intended as a component of the CHIA dissemination system, as originally planned, as were two other original AHRC deliverables, the faceted search interface and the statistical domain ontology. The latter two deliverables were abandoned once it became clear that CHIA was not building a system in which they had a place. |
| Collaborator Contribution | It should be emphasised that much of the work of CHIA is assembling historical data sets through direct contact with particular research teams, which has proceeded as expected; but this is quite similar to the work of the UK History Data Service, which Southall was closely involved with between 1992 and 2008. The technical and organisational novelty of CHIA lay in the Pittsburgh-led work to assemble AND INTEGRATE historical data through online 'crowd-sourcing', primarily from academic researchers unconnected with the project: this was and is the only way that truly BIG data can be assembled for genuinely historical periods (much larger NSF funding has gone to the Terra Populous project (http://www.terrapop.org) which is building a global historical GIS but mainly limited to the 20th century). Unfortunately, the problems described elsewhere with the Col*Fusion system mean that CHIA has started crowd-sourcing much later in its award period than originally planned, far too late for our AHRC-funded project to work with the resulting CHIA data structure; and it has abandoned the original vision of data integration. Some direct financial assistance was provided by the University of Pittsburgh to Portsmouth, partly for travel but also helping fund early software development on PastPlace. |
| Impact | One direct collaborative output should be noted, which predated AHRC and NSF funding but helped make the case: Southall, H, Manning, P., Berman, M., Gerring, J. and Bol, P. (2011) Understanding global change: how best to organize information? Working Paper. National Science Foundation, Arlington. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA) |
| Organisation | University of California, Merced |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Southall's collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, which actually started in 2010, was central to our project as originally planned, and its history is documented under 'Secondments and Placements', as during 2014 Southall spent two months in Pittsburgh working with the central CHIA team. He was involved in making the original case for NSF support, including briefing the NSF at a meeting in Pittsburgh in early 2011, and has been a member of the CHIA project's Executive Committee (attending physical meetings in May 2013 and September 2014). Our DataCube API was originally intended as a component of the CHIA dissemination system, as originally planned, as were two other original AHRC deliverables, the faceted search interface and the statistical domain ontology. The latter two deliverables were abandoned once it became clear that CHIA was not building a system in which they had a place. |
| Collaborator Contribution | It should be emphasised that much of the work of CHIA is assembling historical data sets through direct contact with particular research teams, which has proceeded as expected; but this is quite similar to the work of the UK History Data Service, which Southall was closely involved with between 1992 and 2008. The technical and organisational novelty of CHIA lay in the Pittsburgh-led work to assemble AND INTEGRATE historical data through online 'crowd-sourcing', primarily from academic researchers unconnected with the project: this was and is the only way that truly BIG data can be assembled for genuinely historical periods (much larger NSF funding has gone to the Terra Populous project (http://www.terrapop.org) which is building a global historical GIS but mainly limited to the 20th century). Unfortunately, the problems described elsewhere with the Col*Fusion system mean that CHIA has started crowd-sourcing much later in its award period than originally planned, far too late for our AHRC-funded project to work with the resulting CHIA data structure; and it has abandoned the original vision of data integration. Some direct financial assistance was provided by the University of Pittsburgh to Portsmouth, partly for travel but also helping fund early software development on PastPlace. |
| Impact | One direct collaborative output should be noted, which predated AHRC and NSF funding but helped make the case: Southall, H, Manning, P., Berman, M., Gerring, J. and Bol, P. (2011) Understanding global change: how best to organize information? Working Paper. National Science Foundation, Arlington. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA) |
| Organisation | University of Pittsburgh |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Southall's collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, which actually started in 2010, was central to our project as originally planned, and its history is documented under 'Secondments and Placements', as during 2014 Southall spent two months in Pittsburgh working with the central CHIA team. He was involved in making the original case for NSF support, including briefing the NSF at a meeting in Pittsburgh in early 2011, and has been a member of the CHIA project's Executive Committee (attending physical meetings in May 2013 and September 2014). Our DataCube API was originally intended as a component of the CHIA dissemination system, as originally planned, as were two other original AHRC deliverables, the faceted search interface and the statistical domain ontology. The latter two deliverables were abandoned once it became clear that CHIA was not building a system in which they had a place. |
| Collaborator Contribution | It should be emphasised that much of the work of CHIA is assembling historical data sets through direct contact with particular research teams, which has proceeded as expected; but this is quite similar to the work of the UK History Data Service, which Southall was closely involved with between 1992 and 2008. The technical and organisational novelty of CHIA lay in the Pittsburgh-led work to assemble AND INTEGRATE historical data through online 'crowd-sourcing', primarily from academic researchers unconnected with the project: this was and is the only way that truly BIG data can be assembled for genuinely historical periods (much larger NSF funding has gone to the Terra Populous project (http://www.terrapop.org) which is building a global historical GIS but mainly limited to the 20th century). Unfortunately, the problems described elsewhere with the Col*Fusion system mean that CHIA has started crowd-sourcing much later in its award period than originally planned, far too late for our AHRC-funded project to work with the resulting CHIA data structure; and it has abandoned the original vision of data integration. Some direct financial assistance was provided by the University of Pittsburgh to Portsmouth, partly for travel but also helping fund early software development on PastPlace. |
| Impact | One direct collaborative output should be noted, which predated AHRC and NSF funding but helped make the case: Southall, H, Manning, P., Berman, M., Gerring, J. and Bol, P. (2011) Understanding global change: how best to organize information? Working Paper. National Science Foundation, Arlington. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Free UK Genealogy |
| Organisation | Free UK Genealogy |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | We are providing Free UK Genealogy with full access to our database, and to our existing software, limited only by (a) third party copyrights, which we are trying to resolve, and (b) our need to generate commercial income from our histrorical boundary data. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Free UK Genealogy, a charity registered in England and Wales (1167484) are contributing the time of software developers to further develop the Applications Programming Interface, following departure of our own developer, Michael Stoner. |
| Impact | Collaboration only just started: work to date has given Free UK Genealogy a copy of the software and live access to the database. |
| Start Year | 2016 |
| Description | Pelagios |
| Organisation | Austrian Institute of Technology |
| Department | Next-Generation Content Management Systems Research Group |
| Country | Austria |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The Linked Data formats used by PastPlace are designed to support interchange standards developed by Pelagios, and we developed a dump system for PastPlace implementing those standards very early in the collaboration (and using their funding). This then enabled us to supply them with three successive versions of PastPlace for use in their name annotation work. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Pelagios were able to provide some limited funding from their Mellon Foundation grant 'Pelagios 3', which we used to support our software developer (this was mostly spent in early 2014 on John Westwood, who then left and was replaced by Michael Stoner who has been mainly AHRC-funded). They also provided both specifications for and much detailed practical assistance on implementing data interchange standards; data extraction from Wikidata for the earliest version of PastPlace was done by the Austrian Institute of Technology, although we have since implemented our own Wikidata ingest system. Lastly, Pelagios have supplied us with extensive transcriptions of place name attestations gathered in their Recogito system, although as these link to a variety of existing gazetteers only some are easily aligned with PastPlace (Pelagios has always emphasised they are not actually building a gazetteer, while with PastPlace we definitely are). |
| Impact | Placename attestations gathered via the Pelagios Recogito system form part of the PastPlace gazetteer. The Pelagios investigators contributed a chapter about the project to the gazetteers book, 'Placing Names', co-edited by Southall. Our team spoke about PastPlace at meetings organised by Pelagios, and Southall spoke about Pelagios at two other meetings, the "Linking ancient people, places, objects and texts" round table at Kings College London (December 2014) and the International Conference of Historical Geographers (July 2015). Two members of Pelagios attended the NEH-funded "World historical gazetteer" workshop in Pittsburgh in September 2014. The Pelagios collaboration is highly multi-disciplinary, involving archaeology, classical studies and computer science. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Pelagios |
| Organisation | Open University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The Linked Data formats used by PastPlace are designed to support interchange standards developed by Pelagios, and we developed a dump system for PastPlace implementing those standards very early in the collaboration (and using their funding). This then enabled us to supply them with three successive versions of PastPlace for use in their name annotation work. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Pelagios were able to provide some limited funding from their Mellon Foundation grant 'Pelagios 3', which we used to support our software developer (this was mostly spent in early 2014 on John Westwood, who then left and was replaced by Michael Stoner who has been mainly AHRC-funded). They also provided both specifications for and much detailed practical assistance on implementing data interchange standards; data extraction from Wikidata for the earliest version of PastPlace was done by the Austrian Institute of Technology, although we have since implemented our own Wikidata ingest system. Lastly, Pelagios have supplied us with extensive transcriptions of place name attestations gathered in their Recogito system, although as these link to a variety of existing gazetteers only some are easily aligned with PastPlace (Pelagios has always emphasised they are not actually building a gazetteer, while with PastPlace we definitely are). |
| Impact | Placename attestations gathered via the Pelagios Recogito system form part of the PastPlace gazetteer. The Pelagios investigators contributed a chapter about the project to the gazetteers book, 'Placing Names', co-edited by Southall. Our team spoke about PastPlace at meetings organised by Pelagios, and Southall spoke about Pelagios at two other meetings, the "Linking ancient people, places, objects and texts" round table at Kings College London (December 2014) and the International Conference of Historical Geographers (July 2015). Two members of Pelagios attended the NEH-funded "World historical gazetteer" workshop in Pittsburgh in September 2014. The Pelagios collaboration is highly multi-disciplinary, involving archaeology, classical studies and computer science. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Pelagios |
| Organisation | University of Southampton |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The Linked Data formats used by PastPlace are designed to support interchange standards developed by Pelagios, and we developed a dump system for PastPlace implementing those standards very early in the collaboration (and using their funding). This then enabled us to supply them with three successive versions of PastPlace for use in their name annotation work. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Pelagios were able to provide some limited funding from their Mellon Foundation grant 'Pelagios 3', which we used to support our software developer (this was mostly spent in early 2014 on John Westwood, who then left and was replaced by Michael Stoner who has been mainly AHRC-funded). They also provided both specifications for and much detailed practical assistance on implementing data interchange standards; data extraction from Wikidata for the earliest version of PastPlace was done by the Austrian Institute of Technology, although we have since implemented our own Wikidata ingest system. Lastly, Pelagios have supplied us with extensive transcriptions of place name attestations gathered in their Recogito system, although as these link to a variety of existing gazetteers only some are easily aligned with PastPlace (Pelagios has always emphasised they are not actually building a gazetteer, while with PastPlace we definitely are). |
| Impact | Placename attestations gathered via the Pelagios Recogito system form part of the PastPlace gazetteer. The Pelagios investigators contributed a chapter about the project to the gazetteers book, 'Placing Names', co-edited by Southall. Our team spoke about PastPlace at meetings organised by Pelagios, and Southall spoke about Pelagios at two other meetings, the "Linking ancient people, places, objects and texts" round table at Kings College London (December 2014) and the International Conference of Historical Geographers (July 2015). Two members of Pelagios attended the NEH-funded "World historical gazetteer" workshop in Pittsburgh in September 2014. The Pelagios collaboration is highly multi-disciplinary, involving archaeology, classical studies and computer science. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Wikidata |
| Organisation | Wikimedia Deutschland |
| Country | Germany |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | We aim to contribute to the overall Wikidata project by cleaning the geographical content: a few of the features with geographical coordinates proved to be located on the moon or Mars, and a substantial number lacked minus signs, moving them from Australia to China. Matching with Geonames assists in this. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Although most of our work with Wikidata has been based on downloading publicly available data, during 2014 their documentation was limited and a visit to the Wikidata team in Berlin in April 2014 by Southall and Rainer Simon of the Austrian Institute of Technology was critical to moving the project forward. There was further discussion withe the Wikidata team at the Wikimania conference in London in August 2014, as well as various e-mail exchanges. February 2017: We have been informed by the Wikidata project that they have added two new "properties" to their system: P3615 "Vision of Britain unit ID", and P3616 "Vision of Britain place ID". These enable our data to be directly added to Wikidata. NB we are currently discussing with them whether the former, at least, should be labelled a PastPlace ID; we have pointed out their scope is not limited to Britain. |
| Impact | Simply, the core of PastPlace is the subset of Wikidata entities having a geographical coordinate and our place information is linked together by Wikidata IDs, so a large part of PastPlace IS Wikidata; but with added historical placename information. NB the more formal but currently more limited administrative unit information in PastPlace is NOT derived from Wikidata, and is instead an extension of our existing British system which began as a computerisation of F. Youngs, Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England (Royal Historical Society, 1979 and 1991). |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | 201504 Statistical Linked Data API Presentation (GISRUK, Leeds) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Talked sparked discussion, and enabled us to discuss system with other researchers working on "Data Feeds". The most important benefit was simply enabling/requiring us to put together a first draft of a publishable paper. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://leeds.gisruk.org/index.html |
| Description | 201403 PastPlace Presentation (UK Archives Discovery Forum, Kew) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The presentation stimulated awareness of archivists requirements for gazetteers, especially those based on Linked Data. Professor Southall is a member of the UKAD Steering Group and the presentation formed part of a long history of engagement with the archives sector, so identifying specific consequences from this particular presentation is hard. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://eprints.port.ac.uk/15626/ |
| Description | 201404 PastPlace: Rethinking gazetteers for the semantic web (AGI Scotland) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Talk sparked significant discussion. Note that most GIS practitioners have limited knowledge of either geosemantics or linked data. Helped publicise PastPlace project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/research/eeo/seminars/ |
| Description | 201407 Digital Humanities 2014/Geohumanities SIG |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The lack of publicity made the meetings less effective as a dissemination event than planned, but it was still a very valuable gathering of international researchers working on spatial frameworks for the humanities. It was very useful that there was a substantial overlap between those attending this meeting and the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded gazetteer workshop in Pittsburgh two months later. There was a very useful discussion of why PastPlace was based on Wikidata rather than Geonames. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://geohumanities.org/ |
| Description | 201408 Wikimania conference (London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The meeting provided very valuable opportunities to discuss our collaborations with members of the WikiData and WikiMap project. Southall received an Award from Jimmy Wales, the best known founder of Wikipedia. Although this was an award to the University of Portsmouth as UK Higher Education Institution of the Year, it seemed to be entirely for our team's work with Wikipedia in teaching and research. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania |
| Description | 201409 NEH World Historical Gazetteer Workshop (Pittsburgh) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The meeting included our partners from the Pelagios project, and also all three editors of the Placing Names gazetteers book, so it permitted a very valuable exchange of views. From the UK perspective, the central outcome of this meeting was unfortunate: rather than contribute to existing work on PastPlace and the Pelagios project, or get behind another existing resource such as GeoNames, the Pittsburgh initiators of the meeting decided to start work on a quite new "world-historical gazetteer", and subsequently decided to computerise the gazetteer within Jeremy Black's Atlas of World History (Dorling Kindersley, 2000). As this has been done without permission from the publisher, its use in the UK would clearly be illegal. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | https://twitter.com/hashtag/whgaz |
| Description | 201411 Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis session (SSHA, Toronto) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The session raised awareness of CHIA among historical researchers. The discussant was from the Terra Populous project at the University of Minnesota, so the session facilitated contact with the other main "global historical GIS". |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://ssha.org/pdfs/Final_program_11.7.14.pdf |
| Description | 201411 Moving Historical Geodata to the web (Workshop, New York) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Attending the meeting reinforced existing good relationships with US map librarians, which resulted primarily from the workshop we organised with and at the New York Public Library in February 2012, as a launch event for the JISC-funded Old Maps Online. However, the overall aim of the workshop was to set an agenda for the digitisation of US map and geography libraries and it does not seem to have had that much impact -- although ultimately that is a matter for the NYPL. The meeting reinforced links with Stanford University that were critical to completing a digital version of the International Map of the World which forms part of the PastPlace global gazetteer system. It also enabled direct contact with the main person at the Library of Congress behind their gazetteer project, which clarified that this was not creating new content, only integrating existing content behind a new interface. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://gis.harvard.edu/services/blog/moving-historical-geodata-web |
| Description | 201412 European DDI Users Conference (London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | We were unable to do a presentation, but this enabled us to discuss work on the statistical API with the most technically-competent possible audience for the subject. Southall and Stoner attended the conference including the optional meeting of the DDI Developers. Stoner, despite being new to the field, made a sufficient impression that he was invited to join the Developers Group, and we are able to fund him to attend the next physical meeting in Denmark in December 2015. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi14 |
| Description | 201412 Round table: Linking Ancient World Places, People, Objects and Texts (Kings College London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This was a meeting within the Kings College Digital Humanities seminar series, but featuring four speakers covering people, places, objects and texts. Southall presented on places, covering PastPlace and Pelagios. The audience included considerable expertise on humanities linked data present and there was a lively discussion. Event was attended by Digital Transformations Leadership Fellow, and this was when we discussed redirecting the project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | https://wip.cch.kcl.ac.uk/2014/11/27/linking-ancient-people-places-objects-and-texts/ |
| Description | 201507 International Conference of Historical Geographers (London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Talk sparked questions and discussion afterwards. The presentation also publicised the relaunch the following week of an enhanced and greatly expanded Old Maps Online system. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.ichg2015.org/ |
| Description | 201507 Linked Pasts conference and Pelagios 3+4 final workshop (London 20-22 July 2015) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | PastPlace presentation sparked substantial discussion, and all three of the project team (Southall, Aucott, Stoner) participated in the group discussions. Our presentation featured the first public presentation of the final PastPlace app. It was agreed that there needed to be some public overview of global gazetteer activity, and the best way to do this was for Southall to update the Wikipedia article on gazetteers. The wrap-up meeting for Pelagios 3 and 4 on July 22nd was crucial to arranging addition of Pelagios annotations to PastPlace. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/linked-pasts.html |
| Description | 201511 Social Science History Association Baltimore |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Presentation entitled "Maintaining Scholarly Standards in the Digital Age: Publishing Historical Statistics, Boundaries and Gazetteers as Linked Open Data", within session on "Publishing and Preserving Historical Geospatial Data". This included a presentation of our AHRC-funded work constructing a Linked Data statistical API. The Social Science History Association conferences are, among other roles, the world's most important _annual_ meeting for historical GIS work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.slideshare.net/HumphreySouthall/maintaining-scholarly-standards-in-the-digital-age-publis... |
| Description | 201512 European DDI Users Conference Copenhagen |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Presentation titled "Encapsulating DDI Metadata within a Spatio-Temporal Data Feed for British Historical Statistics", by Michael Stoner. This was a detailed technical presentation of the statistical API we had developed with AHRC funding, to an expert international audience and including a live demonstration. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi15/paper/view/189 |
| Description | Contribution to 2016 International Seminar on the Making of Historical Atlas, Seoul, South Korea |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Invited presentation to "Historical Atlas" spatial humanities workshop in Seoul, South Korea, on 18th-20th May 2016, co-hosted by the Korean Cartographic Association and Northeast Asian History Foundation. "The goal of the workshop is to bring together bright minds to give talks that are idea-focused, and on a wide range of the subjects of spatial humanities (HGIS, digital history, etc), to foster academic learning, inspiration and wonder - and provoke conversations that topics." Other speakers were from China, Japan, Taiwan and the U.S., all expenses were paid, and my contribution has been turned into a 4,500 word chapter in a book published in Korean. The event was entirely in Korean, with guests speaking through translators, which makes it hard to comment on impact; and unsurprisingly I have not been back to Korea since. The event was held at the Korea Press Club in central Seoul, the audience was substantial and certainly included some non-academics. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | GB1900 historical gazetteer: a celebration and launch |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The event, "GB1900 historical gazetteer: a celebration and launch", was held at the Institute of Historical Research, London, on Monday 9th July 2018. It marked both the end of the GB1900 crowd-sourcing project and the launch of the resulting dataset. 71 attendees registered. Speakers included our partners at the National Libraries of Scotland and of Wales, and the Royal Commission of Historic and Ancient Monuments of Wales, plus the editor of "Who Do You Think You Are" magazine and the chair of Free UK genealogy. All the 1,000+ GB1900 volunteers were invited to attend, and presentations of facsimile maps were made to five of the volunteers who had made the largest contributions. Other attendees included staff from the British Library, National Archives, Historic England, the Ramblers Association, and Oxfordshire, Surrey and Warwickshire County Councils. The final dataset was simultaneously made available for download from the existing Vision of Britain site under a Creative Commons license, and a future gazetteer search facility within Vision of Britain was demonstrated. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://visionofbritainblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/11/gb1900-historical-gazetteer-launch/ |