A Vision of Britain through Time
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Grant Holder:
This website presents the history of Great Britain through places between 1801 and 2001. It includes maps, statistical trends, a gazetteer of British administrative units, on-line versions of a selection of tables and early printed text from some of the published Census Reports as well as historical descriptions of places and journeys. The site is free to use and does not require any registration.
Creation of a word file corresponding to every geo-tiff
| Project start date: 2001-09 |
Subject domains:
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| 2d Scanning and photography | Data capture |
| Cataloguing and indexing | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Collating | Data analysis |
| Content-based image retrieval | Data analysis |
| Documentation | Strategy and project management |
| Geo-referencing and projection | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Heads-up digitising and interactive tracing | Data capture |
| Image enhancement | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Text encoding - presentational | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Overlaying | Data analysis |
| Parsing | Data analysis |
| Searching and querying | Data analysis |
| Text recognition | Data capture |
| Usability analysis | Strategy and project management |
| Interface design | Data publishing and dissemination |
| Visualisation | Data analysis |
| Spatial | Content types |
| preservation | Strategy and project management |
| Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) | Metadata standards |
| Spatial data analysis | Data analysis |
| text | Content types |
Funding sources:
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), The Frederick Soddy Trust, Big Lottery Fund
Content types created:
Dataset/structured data, Spatial, Still Image/Graphics, Text
Software tools used:
ArcGIS, Adobe Photoshop, Oracle, PostgreSQL, OpenLayers, GDAL, IIP Image Viewer, Oracle Spatial, PostGIS, WepMapServer
Source material used:
Historical statistics - from census reports, data on births, marriages and deaths, and unemployment and poor law statistics.
10m. words of text: of accounts of journeys around Britain, such as Celia Fiennes' Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, cross-referenced by place to the rest of our system; over 90,000 entries from descriptive gazetteers published in the late 19th century, describing towns, villages and landmarks; and the main report from every census up to 1961.
The recognised Archival place-name authorities for British historical administrative units, including Youngs' Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England (1979, 1991) and Richards' Welsh Administrative and Territorial Units (1969).
The original system mainly consisted of three sets of one inch to one mile maps of Great Britain. The new system includes over 1,000 historical maps showing administrative and parliamentary boundaries, together with a smaller library of British military maps of the whole of Europe.
Digital resource created:
The project aimed to extend and improve a major historical digital resource which has a proven track record in functionality, accessibility and usability.The website "A Vision of Britain through Time" attracts around 80,000 unique users per month and this project was designed to increase the usefulness of this website by adding political units, maps and statistics to the existing system.
The new interface is designed to be a true digital map library in which the original maps can be searched for using standard publication information, and viewed with all their marginal information. This involves a search interface which allows the user to design the map they want by selecting the appropriate area on a zoomable map.
Data Formats created:
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Microsoft Word Document (DOC), Tagged Image File Format (TIFF), geo-tiffs
Metadata standards employed:
Dublin Core, simple (DC), Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), GeoTIFF
Project staff and expertise:
| Principal staff member: | Dr Humphrey Southall |
|---|---|
| Other staff: | Computing officer(s) / Technical supporter(s), Postdoctoral researcher(s) / Research assistant(s) |
| External expertise: |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | Paula Aucott |
| Title | A Vision of Britain through Time |
| Record created | 2010-04-13 |
| Record updated | 2010-04-15 15:26 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2688 |
| Citation of record | Paula Aucott: A Vision of Britain through Time. <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2688> created: 2010-04-13, last updated 2010-04-15 15:26 |