ReACH: Researching e-science Analysis of Census Holdings

e-Science allows large datasets to be searched and analysed quickly, efficiently, and in complex and novel ways. Little application has been made of the processing power of grid technologies to humanities data, due to lack of available datasets, and little understanding of or access to e-Science technologies. The ReACH workshop series aimed to investigate the potential application of grid computing to a large dataset of interest to historians, humanists, digital consumers, and the general public: historical census records. The project partners for the workshop series included UCL, The National Archives, and Ancestry.co.uk.
The project sought to: highlight issues regarding the application of e-Science technologies to Humanities datasets, develop a project proposal for full scale analysis of Ancestry.co.uk's historical datasets utilising Research Computing facilities at UCL, bring together a wide range of interdisciplinary expertise to ensure best practice, highlight any issues of concern which would preclude a large scale project from being useful or successful, ascertain the historians viewpoint of the benefits and concerns in undertaking a larger scale project, predict the form and type of results which will emanate from a future project with the available datasets, and ascertain the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the transcribed datasets.