Digitising Scotland
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Edinburgh
Department Name: School of Geosciences
Abstract
This project aims to digitise the 24 million vital events record images (births, marriages and deaths) for all people in Scotland since 1855 (ie transcribe them into machine encoded text). This will allow research access to individual level information on some 18 million individuals, a large proportion of those who have ever lived in Scotland between 1855 to the present day. At the moment these records are kept as indexed images. This means that to extract any data, a researcher must search for an individual record by name and then manually transcribe the information they need themselves (eg cause of death, occupation etc.); this of course makes any large scale research impossible. A one off investment would mean that these records could made available for major population research.
This dataset will be prepared for linkage to existing longitudinal studies, primarily the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), and more generally to the already highly developed Scottish health informatics systems. This will allow the characteristics (place of birth, age at marriage, occupation, longevity, cause of death etc) of parents, grandparents and other relatives of those followed by the SLS to be analysed and will therefore enhance contemporary Scottish and UK health datasets, health informatics systems, longitudinal datasets and genetic studies. People surviving to have children, grandchildren and other descendents are unlikely to be fully representative of the historic population of Scotland, and the complete transcription will importantly enable a complete linkage exercise between the different to create full or partial life histories for all those experiencing vital events in Scotland since 1855.This will mean that for the first time the UK will have a data system of a similar potential depth and breadth as the Scandinavian and Low countries, whose population registers provide such life histories, with countries, where work such as those using "The Demographic Database" at Umeá University, Sweden; the "Historical Population Registers" Project at the Norwegian Historical Data Centre, University of Tromso, Norway and the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, based at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands is currently extending knowledge of demography as well as economic and social history over the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century. Such a dataset will bring the possibility of exploring the condition of the present Scottish population within the context of their families through multiple generations of micro-data.
This dataset will be prepared for linkage to existing longitudinal studies, primarily the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), and more generally to the already highly developed Scottish health informatics systems. This will allow the characteristics (place of birth, age at marriage, occupation, longevity, cause of death etc) of parents, grandparents and other relatives of those followed by the SLS to be analysed and will therefore enhance contemporary Scottish and UK health datasets, health informatics systems, longitudinal datasets and genetic studies. People surviving to have children, grandchildren and other descendents are unlikely to be fully representative of the historic population of Scotland, and the complete transcription will importantly enable a complete linkage exercise between the different to create full or partial life histories for all those experiencing vital events in Scotland since 1855.This will mean that for the first time the UK will have a data system of a similar potential depth and breadth as the Scandinavian and Low countries, whose population registers provide such life histories, with countries, where work such as those using "The Demographic Database" at Umeá University, Sweden; the "Historical Population Registers" Project at the Norwegian Historical Data Centre, University of Tromso, Norway and the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, based at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands is currently extending knowledge of demography as well as economic and social history over the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century. Such a dataset will bring the possibility of exploring the condition of the present Scottish population within the context of their families through multiple generations of micro-data.
Planned Impact
This project will not involved the production of research output, although it will play an important role in maximising the impact of outputs of projects by researchers using dataset produced (see Pathways to Impact). However in other parts of the application, we have outlined how the data may be used. From this it is possible to identify research areas that this data will support and therefore potential beneficiaries. There will of course be many ways that innovative researchers will use this data, that we cannot yet envisage.
Those working in Social policy will benefit from a deeper understanding:
- of social mobility across 150 years
- the impact of a developing welfare state
- the nature of industrialisation and its impact on populations
- of fertility
Those working in Educational policy will have an insight into
- the impact of changing educational policy over 150
Those working in public health will come to better understand
- the effect of food shortages for mothers during pregnancy on the later life (intergenerational) health of the child
- the impact of urbanisation and severe environmental insults - on health
- the long-term effect of serious viruses (eg the 1918 influenza pandemic) on the surviving population
Those working in the NHS
- will benefit potentially from better family history risk assessment tools
- will more easily be able to produce genealogies in support of clinical genetic counselling services
- will benefit from refinement to genetic studies that will be gained from extensive pedigrees, this is likely to be a substantial impact
The public
- the Scottish public will benefit from the enhancements to their healthcare system
- may very directly benefit from enhancements to the genetic cancer counselling service and family history as used in clinical practise
- they will also benefit from the added attractiveness to researchers across many sectors - including the biomedical field - of the enhanced data environment that exists in Scotland and that will be enhanced with the dataset.
Those working in Social policy will benefit from a deeper understanding:
- of social mobility across 150 years
- the impact of a developing welfare state
- the nature of industrialisation and its impact on populations
- of fertility
Those working in Educational policy will have an insight into
- the impact of changing educational policy over 150
Those working in public health will come to better understand
- the effect of food shortages for mothers during pregnancy on the later life (intergenerational) health of the child
- the impact of urbanisation and severe environmental insults - on health
- the long-term effect of serious viruses (eg the 1918 influenza pandemic) on the surviving population
Those working in the NHS
- will benefit potentially from better family history risk assessment tools
- will more easily be able to produce genealogies in support of clinical genetic counselling services
- will benefit from refinement to genetic studies that will be gained from extensive pedigrees, this is likely to be a substantial impact
The public
- the Scottish public will benefit from the enhancements to their healthcare system
- may very directly benefit from enhancements to the genetic cancer counselling service and family history as used in clinical practise
- they will also benefit from the added attractiveness to researchers across many sectors - including the biomedical field - of the enhanced data environment that exists in Scotland and that will be enhanced with the dataset.
Organisations
- University of Edinburgh (Lead Research Organisation)
- University of Copenhagen (Collaboration)
- University of Tromso (Collaboration)
- Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Collaboration)
- Erasmus MC (Collaboration)
- University of Ghent (Collaboration)
- Radboud University Nijmegen (Collaboration)
- Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) (Collaboration)
Publications
Akgün Ö
(2019)
Linking Scottish vital event records using family groups
in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History
Akgün, Ö
(2017)
An identifier scheme for the Digitising Scotland project
Buckham S
(2016)
Death in Modern Scotland, 1855-1955
| Description | This DS project aimed to digitise the 25.8 million vital events record images (births, marriages and deaths) for all people in Scotland since 1855 (ie transcribe them into machine encoded text). This will allow research access to individual level information on some 18 million individuals, a large proportion of those who have ever lived in Scotland between 1855 to the present day. Prior to DS these records were kept as indexed images. This means that to extract any data, a researcher must search for an individual record by name and then manually transcribe the information they need themselves (eg cause of death, occupation etc.); this of course makes any large scale research impossible. This project has main 4 objectives within 4 workpackages, to: [1] digitise vital events records back to 1855. [2] to develop a method and software package to automatically code occupational descriptions to the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO). [3] to develop a frame with which to code cause of death descriptions to a standardised Classification of Disease and to produce a software package for separating different causes and then classifying them automatically. [4] to develop a method and software package to link the addresses on the records to a consistent, through time, geographical reference. The research in workpackage 2-4 have demonstrated that it is possible to automatically code the textual information in the records using machine learning techniques. This is of course vital to an endeavor that needs to 25.8 million records. Because this project is developing a research infrastructure at the moment, there has been only pilot research work as yet, however one might expect the dataset to enable the following type of questions to be answered.in the near future Those working in Social policy will benefit from a deeper understanding: - of social mobility across 150 years - the impact of a developing welfare state - the nature of industrialisation and its impact on populations Those working in Educational policy will have an insight into - the impact of changing educational policy over 150 Those working in public health will come to better understand - the effect of food shortages for mothers during pregnancy on the later life (intergenerational) health of the child - the impact of urbanisation and severe environmental insults - on health - the long-term effect of serious viruses (eg the 1918 influenza pandemic) on the surviving population Those working in the NHS - will benefit potentially from better family history risk assessment tools - will more easily be able to produce genealogies in support of clinical genetic counselling services - will benefit from refinement to genetic studies that will be gained from extensive pedigrees, this is likely to substantial The public - the Scottish public may benefit from the enhancements to their healthcare system - may very directly benefit from enhancements to the genetic cancer counselling service and family history as used in clinical practise - they will also benefit from the added attractiveness to researchers across many sectors - including the biomedical field- of the enhanced data environment that exists in Scotland and that will be enhanced with the dataset. |
| Exploitation Route | Similar data enhancement projects are being attempted in a number of countries. There has been considerable interest in the techniques and software products we have developed. We are actively sharing this learning and products with these projects. Specifically the automatic classification software developed within DS was used to classify (1) English language occupation strings to the HISCO classification system, for Prof. Marco van Leeuwen, of the Sociology Department at Utrecht University and (2) occupations from the newly created Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS) Birth Cohort of 1936 (SLSBC1936), which includes occupations from the Census-like 1939 National Register (3) we are working closely with the CLARIAH project in the Netherlands, a distributed research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences (http://www.clariah.nl/en/), to share our machine learning software. The approach and methods developed in the project are being exploited by the project's partner government agency National Records of Scotland. They are exploring how potentially to use the software and the record capture system. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Healthcare,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other |
| URL | http://www.lscs.ac.uk/projects/digitising-scotland/ |
| Description | The DS project will not be involved the production of research output and the DS project focused on data creation and enhancement. However, it is possible to identify areas of research that this data will support and therefore potential beneficiaries. There will of course be many ways that innovative researchers will use this data that we cannot yet envisage. Such research and analysis will enhance contemporary Scottish and UK health datasets, health informatics systems, longitudinal datasets and genetic studies. Many of the new potential research opportunities made available through the DS project are listed on the DS website (http://www.lscs.ac.uk/projects/digitising-scotland/research-potential-of-digitising-scotland). Firstly, the LSCS centre has put considerable time into organising and structuring this DS work, sharing knowledge and building networks across Europe. Through close collaboration with other countries working on similar data we successfully won a Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN) European Training Networks (ETN) 'Methodologies and Data mining techniques for the analysis of Big Data based on Longitudinal Population and Epidemiological Registers' (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/200475_en.html). We hosted 2 early stage researchers (ESR) based in Edinburgh with close association with DS along with 2 research stays from other ESRs within the network all working in historical demography on short research projects aligned with the DS project. The ESRs take back learning from their stays within the LSCS centre to their home institutions to enhance further research projects. Similar historical data enhancement projects are being attempted in a number of countries. From attending workshops and within networks there has been considerable interest in the DS techniques and software products for automatically coding text (occupations and causes of death) and geolocation that we have developed. We are sharing this learning and products with these projects given the DS work will have further applications - and has already been used by 3 projects. Specifically the automatic classification software developed within DS was used to classify English language occupation strings to the HISCO classification system, for Prof. Marco van Leeuwen, of the Sociology Department at Utrecht University. Second, another project within the wider LSCS centre involves the creation of new Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS) Birth Cohort of 1936 (SLSBC1936), which includes information from the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947 (SMS1947) - a cognitive ability test that almost all Scottish children born in 1936 sat - and linked it to the Census-like 1939 National Register, the current NHS Central Register (NHSCR) and the SLS. We coded the occupations from this based on the DS automatic classification software. Third, work done on the coding and classification of deaths to ICD-10 and a historical extension has fed into the Studying the history of Health in Port cities (SHiP) project that is developing a European historical extension of ICD-10. Further the DS data presents an exciting opportunity for the NHS in Scotland. The NHS Genetics Genealogy team has, up until now, used a very limited index to the main civil registration data set to reconstruct family trees, as requested by the NHS genetic counselling teams across Scotland. With the new DS data created they will be able to much more effectively search for family members. This will allow the team to construct more pedigrees for less time, enhancing the scope and scale of their work. Lastly, to note the DS project and data is now the basis of the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR) Scottish Historic Population Platform (SHiPP) project, which will go beyond DS to create research ready data: https://www.scadr.ac.uk/our-research/shipp. In addition, DS maintain a presence on the web (https://digitisingscotland.ac.uk/ last year 863 sessions from 788 users, of which over 91% were via desktops) and social media - @digitisingscot we now have 213 followers. And we record the outputs of project team members in the DS online outputs repository: https://digitisingscotland.ac.uk/outputs/ |
| First Year Of Impact | 2016 |
| Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other |
| Impact Types | Societal |
| Description | MSCA-ITN-2015-ETN - LONGPOP - Methodologies and Data mining techniques for the analysis of Big Data based on Longitudinal Population and Epidemiological Registers |
| Amount | € 3,860,731 (EUR) |
| Funding ID | MSCA-ITN-2015-ETN |
| Organisation | Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions |
| Department | Initial Training Networks (ITN) |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| Country | Global |
| Start | 02/2016 |
| End | 02/2020 |
| Description | Alice Reid - SHiP - studying the history of health in Port cities |
| Organisation | Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) |
| Country | Spain |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This network aims to study the history of health in port cities, using individual death registers. The first task of the network is to develop an international historical cause of death coding scheme. This is largely built on the scheme developed with DS, and our input has been to share this with SHiP, and liaise between DS and ShiP to maintain comparability and integrity. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Partners bring their own data and discuss how the scheme might work in an international context and with their own language. We have had five meetings since 2017, and two more are planned. |
| Impact | as yet only conference presentations |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Alice Reid - SHiP - studying the history of health in Port cities |
| Organisation | Erasmus MC |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Sector | Hospitals |
| PI Contribution | This network aims to study the history of health in port cities, using individual death registers. The first task of the network is to develop an international historical cause of death coding scheme. This is largely built on the scheme developed with DS, and our input has been to share this with SHiP, and liaise between DS and ShiP to maintain comparability and integrity. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Partners bring their own data and discuss how the scheme might work in an international context and with their own language. We have had five meetings since 2017, and two more are planned. |
| Impact | as yet only conference presentations |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Alice Reid - SHiP - studying the history of health in Port cities |
| Organisation | Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf |
| Country | Germany |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This network aims to study the history of health in port cities, using individual death registers. The first task of the network is to develop an international historical cause of death coding scheme. This is largely built on the scheme developed with DS, and our input has been to share this with SHiP, and liaise between DS and ShiP to maintain comparability and integrity. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Partners bring their own data and discuss how the scheme might work in an international context and with their own language. We have had five meetings since 2017, and two more are planned. |
| Impact | as yet only conference presentations |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Alice Reid - SHiP - studying the history of health in Port cities |
| Organisation | Radboud University Nijmegen |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This network aims to study the history of health in port cities, using individual death registers. The first task of the network is to develop an international historical cause of death coding scheme. This is largely built on the scheme developed with DS, and our input has been to share this with SHiP, and liaise between DS and ShiP to maintain comparability and integrity. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Partners bring their own data and discuss how the scheme might work in an international context and with their own language. We have had five meetings since 2017, and two more are planned. |
| Impact | as yet only conference presentations |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Alice Reid - SHiP - studying the history of health in Port cities |
| Organisation | University of Copenhagen |
| Country | Denmark |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This network aims to study the history of health in port cities, using individual death registers. The first task of the network is to develop an international historical cause of death coding scheme. This is largely built on the scheme developed with DS, and our input has been to share this with SHiP, and liaise between DS and ShiP to maintain comparability and integrity. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Partners bring their own data and discuss how the scheme might work in an international context and with their own language. We have had five meetings since 2017, and two more are planned. |
| Impact | as yet only conference presentations |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Alice Reid - SHiP - studying the history of health in Port cities |
| Organisation | University of Ghent |
| Country | Belgium |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This network aims to study the history of health in port cities, using individual death registers. The first task of the network is to develop an international historical cause of death coding scheme. This is largely built on the scheme developed with DS, and our input has been to share this with SHiP, and liaise between DS and ShiP to maintain comparability and integrity. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Partners bring their own data and discuss how the scheme might work in an international context and with their own language. We have had five meetings since 2017, and two more are planned. |
| Impact | as yet only conference presentations |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Alice Reid - SHiP - studying the history of health in Port cities |
| Organisation | University of Tromso |
| Country | Norway |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This network aims to study the history of health in port cities, using individual death registers. The first task of the network is to develop an international historical cause of death coding scheme. This is largely built on the scheme developed with DS, and our input has been to share this with SHiP, and liaise between DS and ShiP to maintain comparability and integrity. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Partners bring their own data and discuss how the scheme might work in an international context and with their own language. We have had five meetings since 2017, and two more are planned. |
| Impact | as yet only conference presentations |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Studying the History of Health in Port Cities (SHiP) - Dr Eilidh Garrett |
| Organisation | Radboud University Nijmegen |
| Department | Faculty of Arts |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Work on cause of death coding for Digitising Scotland is informing attempts to create a cause of death coding scheme which can be used across time and in a variety of European countries |
| Collaborator Contribution | exchange of information on other cause of death coding schemes and debate on 'best practice' |
| Impact | No outcomes yet |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Title | Automatic classification for occupation and cause of death strings |
| Description | The software uses Apache Mahout machine learning algorithms to classify unseen strings from historical records. It uses a sample of human-classified records to train the machine learning models. The software has been used to classify occupation and cause-of-death strings to the HISCO and ICD-10 coding systems, respectively. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | None as yet. |
| URL | http://digitisingscotland.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/record_classification/index.html |
| Title | Historical Address Geocoder (HAG-GIS) 1.0.0 |
| Description | The Historical Address Geocoder (HAG-GIS) is a Python 2.7 program for automating the geocoding process for the Digitising Scotland project. The geocoding process involves fuzzy-matching historical records with contemporary addresses. This automating system takes into account spatial information deriving from historical administrative data improving the accuracy of the geocoded historical addresses and producing geography boundaries at small administrative scales where geographical boundaries are not available. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2015 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The HAG-GIS software is a core tool for the geocoding process of Digitising Scotland project which has the potential to be of high impact in a variety of different fields, whether it is simply the digitisation of the records or the further coding and linking of the data. It will allow researchers to study events for some 18 million individuals over 150 years of events allowing the quantification of change in the important characteristics of Scottish Society over time and space. |
| URL | http://lscs-projects.github.io/HAGGIS/ |
| Title | SMARTS (SQL, Management, Accountable, Reliable, and Tracking System) |
| Description | Developed in house by CDDA SMARTS allows for the remote tracking of data entry projects including time spent entering data, accuracy levels by individuals, rekeying activities, and superviser managrment. It is being rolled out by CDDA to other data capture projects. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Impact | Allows for accurate tracking of data capture work |
| Title | Synthetic population generator |
| Description | The software generates synthetic human populations. It is configurable with a number of probability distributions including longevity, number of children, occupation, age at marriage, parenthood etc. The software requires a Java runtime. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | None as yet; it is hoped that the application will be useful in the evaluation and comparison of population linkage techniques. |
| URL | http://digitisingscotland.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/population_model/ |
| Description | BitBlaster: A fast complete similarity search algorithm - Graham Kirby |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Research talk at meeting of St Andrew Institute for Data-Intensive Research |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://www.idir.st-andrews.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/BitBlaster.pdf |
| Description | Digitising Scotland Summer Seminar |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A seminar organised by the Digitising Scotland team over two days - day one was a day of sharing information on procedural catch ups and progress updates. Day two was a workshop format focusing on research from the various Digitising Scotland groupings along with planning and the next steps following transcription. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Digitising Scotland Summer Workshop 2018 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Digitising Scotland Summer one day workshop was held on 28th August 2018 in Edinburgh to bring together the various DS collaborators for progress updates, information sharing and discussion on planning and next steps. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Dr Beata Nowok presented at the '44th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association'; Chicago, IL, 21-24 November 2019. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Dr Beata Nowok presented on 'Translating' records of Scotland's past to tell meaningful stories: The production of Scottish longitudinal historical micro-dataset at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association'; Chicago, IL, 21-24 November 2019. The conference involves over a thousand scholars from around the world, although graduate students and faculty from the leading American universities predominant. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://www.cossa.org/event/2019-social-science-history-association-annual-meeting/ |
| Description | Dr Beata Nowok presented at the 'British Society for Population Studies 2019 Conference'; Cardiff, UK, 9-11 September 2019. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Dr Beata Nowok presented on 'Temporal and seasonal patterns of infant mortality in Scotland, 1901-1970' at the British Society for Population Studies 2019 Conference; Cardiff, UK, 9-11 September 2019. The BSPS annual meeting is a premier conference of demographers and social and health scientists from the United States and abroad. Here senior, mid- and early-career demographers are afforded the opportunity to present their research in oral and poster sessions, hear of others' findings, and network with their peers |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | http://www.populationassociation.org/sidebar/annual-meeting/ |
| Description | Dr Eilidh Garrett presentated to European Society for Historical Demography Biennial conference |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr Eilidh Garrett presented 'Tracing the epidemiological transition in the deaths occurring on the Isle of Skye, Scotland 1861-1970' to the European Society for Historical Demography Biennial conference June 2019. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Dr Eilidh Garrett presented to British Populations Studies Society annual conference |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dr Eilidh Garrett presented 'Tracing the epidemiological transition in the deaths occurring on the Isle of Skye, Scotland 1861-1970' to the British Populations Studies Society annual conference, Sep 2019. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Estimating maternal mortality rates during the 1918 flu using birth to death linkage |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | On 9th November 2020, Prof Peter Christen, Australian National University presented at the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN). https://www.ipdln.org/sites/default/files/2020conference_liveevents2.pdf |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | http://www.ipdln.org/ |
| Description | Geocoding 24 million historical addresses in Scotland (HGIS meeting UoE) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | talk sparked questions and discussion afterwards as purpose was to share H-GIS methods - |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Geocoding 24 million historical addresses in Scotland from 1855 to 1974 (EHPS-Net Meeting) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | talk sparked questions and discussion afterwards as purpose was to share H-GIS methods - |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www.ehps-net.eu/news/workshop-working-group-9 |
| Description | International Automatic Coding Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 5th May 2020. International Automatic Coding Workshop Attended by 25 researchers from across Scotland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. This brought together specialists in data science and historic data. We presented our approach for the Digitising Scotland data which also forms part of SCADR eCohorts methodological work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Involvement in Health in Port Cities project, Dr Eilidh Garrett |
| 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 | Dr Eilidh Garrett attended a formal working group to discuss cause of death coding system devised for Digitising Scotland project with interational colleagues wishing to devise a scheme capable of being used across the countries of Europe and beyond and for a variety of time periods. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://www.ru.nl/historicaldemography/research-projects/ship/ |
| Description | Maternal Mortality in Scotland and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | 26/3/21 - Talk given by Chris Dibben at the European Social Science History Conference which was held online. Other authors include B Nowok, A Reid, L Williamson and Z Feng. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://esshc.socialhistory.org/conference/programme/2020?textsearch=Dibben |
| Description | On 3-4 July 2015, Working Group 9 - GIS - held a workshop 'Integrating time, space and individual life stories'. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 20 European experts in GIS and historical research met in Edinburgh to discuss advances in their particular areas of reserach. New ideas and potential future collaborations were identified. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Participation in a 'Hackathon' ('Thyynge') at St Andrews' Department of Computing Science 2nd - 4th November in St Andrews |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Digitising Scotland team were involved in this 'Hackathon' which was organised following the Skye Data Linkage Workshop in August 2016. The 'Hackathon' (also called 'Thyynge') was held over three days at St Andrews' Department of Computing Science 2nd - 4th November. The Hackathon brought together teams of computer scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Herriot Watt and ANU together with demographic historians from Cambridge, Albany, Madrid and Edinburgh. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Participation in the EHPS-NET workshop, University of Edinburgh, UK |
| 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 | Presentation on "HAG-GIS: An advanced system for geocoding historical addresses in Scotland" in the EHPS-NET workshop- Working Group 9- "GIS - integrating time, space and individual life stories", University of Edinburgh, UK, Daras K., Feng Z. & Dibben C., Williamson L., 2015. The main purpose of the workshop was to discuss, compare and develop methods and standards for storage, integration, analyses and visualization of data. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/activities/ehpsnet-meeting-working-group-9--gis(82e20892-af17... |
| Description | Presentation at 'A Study of Health in Port Cities (SHiP)' international workshop on 'What was killing infants in port cities, 1850-1950' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Drs Eilidh Garrett and Alice Reid presented at A Study of Health in Port Cities (SHiP) international workshop on 'What was killing infants in port cities, 1850-1950'. The workshop was in two tranches on 21st January 2021 and 2nd February 2021 organised by Angelique Janssens at Radboudt University in the Netherlands |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Presentation at HGIS Workshop by SLS Researcher Hannalis Jaadla |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Digitising Scotland researcher Hannalis Jaadla presented on 'Scottish Cities and Addresses' at the Historical GIS Workshop in 9th January 2023 in Edinburgh Climate Change Institute (ECCI), High School Yards, EH1 1LZ. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Presentation at Skye Data Linkage Workshop 27th August 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The Digitising Scotland team were presenting 'Historical record linkage on the Isle of Skye: A colloquium for historians and computer scientists' at the Skye Data Linkage event for PhDs and early careers researchers. The workshop brought together teams of computer scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Herriot Watt and ANU together with demographic historians from Cambridge, Albany, Madrid and Edinburgh. Much of the workshop was spent in dialouge between the historians and the computer scientists, to learn each others language(s) and ways of thinking. The historians realised that not everyone can read historic documents and that data can be organised and thought of in a myriad of ways. The computer scientists learned that very little historical data is straight forward and that historians don't look at data in the same way at all. Progress was made and mutual understanding moved forward. A further activity, a 'hackathon' was arranged to follow up the event. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Presentation by Alice Reid at British Society for Population Studies Conference |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Academic research paper: Subnational mortality patterns in Great Britain, 1861-1901. Presented by Alice Reid in person British Society for Population Studies Conference, 5-7 September 2022, University of Winchester. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.lse.ac.uk/international-development/research/british-society-for-population-studies/Asse... |
| Description | Presentation by Eilidh Garrett at SCADR Scottish Historic Population Platform (SHiPP) update meeting |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Workshop presentation by Eilidh Garrett: 'From Deathbed to Database: coding causes of death with ICD10h' at SCADR Scottish Historic Population Platform (SHiPP) update meeting. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Reconstructing Historical Populations: How Do You Know if it Worked? - Graham Kirby |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Research talk at meeting of St Andrew Institute for Data-Intensive Research, October 2018. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://www.idir.st-andrews.ac.uk |
| Description | Spatial Humanities Expert Meeting, Lancaster |
| 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 | Alice Reid, Eilidh Garrett and Joe Day were invited to attend, as experts, a Spatial Humanities Expert Meeting on Monday 28 November 2016 to discuss prospects for research in demographic history and the history of public health and health inequalities as part of the Spatial Humanities Project at the University of Lancaster (ERC funded). There were a number of presentations from the Spatial Humanities team, the experts attending, and a general discussion about possible new routes of enquiry. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Understanding the linking possibilities in Scottish records and an algorithmic approach to full linkage - Graham Kirby |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The purpose was to disseminate research on multiple linkage opportunities within rich demographic datasets, and to promote discussion. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://ijpds.org/article/view/508 |
| Description | Validating synthetic longitudinal populations for evaluation of population data linkage - Graham Kirby |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The purpose was to disseminate research on synthesising realistic population data for evaluation of linkage approaches, and to promote discussion. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://ijpds.org/article/view/504 |