Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Geo-spatial repositories – or the lack of them:
Recording Britain’s historical geography
Humphrey Southall
(University of Portsmouth/
Great Britain Historical GIS)
Maintaining long-term access to
geospatial data, October 27th 2006
Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Background: the GB Historical GIS
• Construction of geo-spatial data from 1994 onwards
– Statistical data go further back
• Largest historical GIS anywhere?
– US National HGIS has more polygons but mainly from modern
census tract data, and content less diverse
• Diverse content: not just statistics and boundaries
– Scanned and geo-referenced historic maps
– Geographical name authorities
– Geo-referenced text (c. 10m words)
• Total cost c £1.6m: ESRC, National Lottery, charities
• Basis for Vision of Britain web site
– C. 50,000 unique users per month
• Largest geo-spatial content creators based in UK HE?
27th October 2006
2
Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
GB Historical GIS: Funding 1994-2000
’94
10 11 12 1
2
3
4
5
6
Research
Fellow (I.
Gregory)
ESRC
Data Entry
Operator
Wellcome
Electron-ic
Atlas Pilot
RA
Local
Historian
RA
GIS Construction
RA
Health
Variations
RA
Belfast
Team
Leader
Belfast
Clerical
Officer
Belfast
Trainee
Belfast
Trainee
Belfast
Trainee
Belfast
Trainee
Belfast
Trainee
27th October 2006
7
8
1996
9 10 11 12 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Wellco- Q JISC/Spe
me/ M c. Coll. in
CMH W Human.
Nfld
8
1997
9 10 11 12 1
2
3
ESRC
WellcomeNuffield
4
5
6
7
8
1998
9 10 11 12 1
Leverhulm Fe B L'hul
es A me
e
Pop.
JISC/
Inv. Leverhulme Know. Fees Pilgrim
Gall.
Cttee
Leverhulme
Roehampton Institute/
Hearth Tax Project
(Pilgrim, Aurelius, etc)
2000
ESRC
ESRC
JISC/JTAP Initiative
JISC/Spec.
Coll. in
Human.
1999
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
ESRC
1995
Year
Month
Pilg- Slu
rim sh
Leverhulme
Contra- Misc
ct
ESRC (Health
Variations
Programme)
ESRC
Wellcome
ESRC
JISC
ESRC
ESRC
Res. Charities
ESRC
UK National Lottery
ESRC
ESRC
Wellcome
ESRC
ESRC
ESRC
Wellcome
Wellcome
Wellcome
Wellcome
Wellcome
3
Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
GB Historical GIS: Funding 2000-4
Year
99
Month
10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2000
Director
(Humphrey
Southall)
Gaz. Officer/
Office Manager
(Paula Aucott)
GIS Officer
(Nick Burton)
2001
2002
Portsmouth
internal
ESRC (Vicki
Gilham)
Mortality Res.
Fellow (Eilidh
Garrett)
Clerical Assist.
P/t (Rachel
Graville)
Database
Officer (Neil
Perarson)
Gaz
ESRC
ESRC
ESRC
Health Var.
2003
NOF-funded teaching replacement
NOF
Wellcome
Port
Inter
-nal
ESRC
Gaz. (Engl
Her/Fitch/
Aurelius)
NOF
Information
Officer (TBA)
NOF
BL
QUB
Intnl
Belfast Team
Leader (Elaine
Yeates)
Belfast Clerical
Officer
Belfast Clerical
Officer
Belfast Trainee
Belfast Trainee
Belfast Trainee
Belfast Trainee
Belfast Trainee
NOF
Wellcome
Visual. Officer
Leeds (James
Macgill)
Wellcome
2004
NOF
NB This funding
history in itself
creates a
preservation
issue as archiving
(notably through
UKDA) depends
on who THE
funding body was.
NOF
NOF
NOF
ESRC
ESRC
ESRC
ESRC
27th October 2006
Wellcome
Wellcome
Wellcome
Wellcome
Wellcome
NOF
NOF
NOF
NOF
4
Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Vision of Britain: future prospects
• Funded: linking European countries (QVIZ)
–
–
–
–
–
Already have data for Sweden and Estonia
Building high-level temporal GIS of European states
Explicitly an “administrative ontology”
Large copyright issues
Forcing construction of better “repository” at Portsmouth
• Piecemeal: reconstructing historic landscapes
– Potentials for massive scanning projects
– Policy applications
• Short-listed: Reconstruction of historic constituencies
–
–
–
–
In current round of JISC digitisation bids
Project would scan full collection of boundary maps
Adding election results since 1860s to Vision of Britain
Large preservation issues
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Issue: preserving the GB Historical GIS
• Web site will not necessarily exist after 30th
September 2007
– which makes preserving components even more important
• Statistical data archived through UKDA
• But none of the geo-spatial data properly archived:
– Despite this project’s links to data archives, digital
preservation coalition, etc
– Post-1871 boundary data held by EDINA and used in
UKBORDERS, but EDINA are not an archive
– “Ancient parishes” held by UKDA but in proprietary formats
– Most scanned maps archived by British Library, who did
scanning, but no geo-referencing
– Land use maps held by DEFRA, but sounds like some CDs
in a cupboard
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Common theme: originating geo-spatial data
within the HE sector
• I.e. data which are broadly free of Ordnance Survey
and other non-academic copyrights
• Obviously arises with historical projects, which are
mostly based on out-of-copyright OS mapping
• But NB my department also holds very large
collection of digitised tithe maps, each covering a
single parish
• Data may be originated entirely within HE sector but
not necessarily by individual academics
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Issue: Who archives vector data?
• EDINA disseminate GIS data to the UK HE sector, both for
Ordnance Survey data and mine, but are they an archive?
• UK Data Archive are an archive but have never committed to
employing anyone with GIS expertise
– Hence “Ancient Parishes” GIS, one of their most heavily used
items, not held in a sustainable format
• Special issues for GB Historical GIS:
– Holding time variant boundary data:
• Original system based on date-stamped arcs
• Relatively easily integrated into UKBORDERS but non-standard
• New system based on polygons, but uses “date objects” to hold
historical dates of varying specificity
– Holding data for multiple countries involving various national
coordinate systems
– Issues being addressed in our new “repository”
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Historical Vectors: Civil Parishes in 1911
This is just one detail from a series of separate polygon coverages for
E&W c. 1851, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1951, 1961 and 1971
… and what about the associated parish names?
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Issue: Who archives geo-raster data?
• Many of the issues with vector data apply here, but
large additional problems due to file sizes
• NB most scanned maps are digitised by map
librarians who do not geo-reference. Why??
• Major issue with current JISC proposal
– Virtually required to make commitments re. Long-term
preservation
– But JISC’s main suggestion, the Atlas petabyte filestore at
RAL, is only a back-end
– Any image archive needs to provide for at least Dublin Core
as well as preservation metadata
– But a geo-spatial archive needs to provide for georeferencing as well
• This problem may be about to get much bigger…
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Historical Maps: Topographic
• NB much of the value here lies in the geo-referencing
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Land Utilisation Survey of
Great Britain (1930s):
published maps
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Land Utilisation Survey: unpublished maps
• Water-colour map of Inverness
area, scanned at RGS
• Field survey sheet from LSE
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Land Utilisation Survey: colour separations
• Colour separation for
green (pasture) layer
from the LUSGB
National Summary
Sheet (South)
• Held by LSE
archives
• NB better suited than
the published maps
to the systematic
extraction of land
use statistics
• Project funded by
Environment Agency
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Potentials: Marked-up 6” maps
• GBHGIS so far has mainly worked on 1” maps but large future
potential for larger scale maps
• Many sets of 20th century maps:
– Field survey sheets of 1st Land Utilisation Survey (LSE basement)
– Farm boundary maps of 1941 Farm Survey (in TNA at Kew)
– Field survey sheets of 2nd Land Utilisation Survey (in house of
project director in Dulwich)
– ONS maps of census enumeration districts (Christchurch store)
– Soil Survey field sheets (example from HEDS)
• Each of these is a set of OS 6 inch maps with added coloured
lines or area shading
• Each set comprises 8-10,000 sheets
• Aside: even if microfilms exist, may well be unfit for purpose
– Problems with ONS existing record of census boundaries
• Physical preservation of these maps poses massive problems,
but is digital preservation any easier
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Historical Maps: 1941 Farm Boundaries
TNA Class MAF 73: one of about 36,000 maps showing the
boundaries of c. 320,000 farms (Countryside Agency funding)
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Issue: OS copyright blocking archiving
• Some of the 6” maps previously discussed use OS
mapping still within copyright
• My understanding is that organisations are allowed to
scan if the only purpose is to create an archive copy,
but greater clarity is needed – much confusion, even
within central govt depts
• Archiving will not necessarily be purely internal to the
organisation, so would this archiving exemption extend
to material going into a national geo-spatial repository?
• Does vectorising only the overlaid information avoid
problem?
– Boundary lines, land uses, &c, tends to follow lines on base
map
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Issue: Tracking rights within an archive
• “Dual economy” of geo-spatial data:
– Formal economy: Ordnance Survey – EDINA – rights management
– this meeting
– Informal economy: data sets passed around between academic
researchers, often deliberately blurring origins
• At least one example of a government department digitising boundaries
from OS maps without permission
– “Informal” material often of immense value, but how will it get
archived?
• Already noted that historical GIS work unusual because we can
legally treat historical mapping as a free resource
– But growing issue of university attempts to manage rights
– GBH project’s agreement with ONS not only allows us to
computerise 1961 and later census data, it was drafted to legitimise
such data computerised by other s without permission
– Hard to imagine a similar relationship with the OS
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Issue: Bounding the geo-spatial
• Discussion so far assumes “geo-spatial” equals vector
data, mainly digital boundaries, and geo-rasters
– JISC’s approach to archiving often looks like “divide and rule” to
sustain a network of data centres each with a content type
• But GIS widely advocated as a framework for integrating
much more diverse content
– Maybe more talked about than achieved, but we believe that the
GB Historical GIS has realised this potential
– Some hundreds of thousands of pounds spent not on digitisation
but integration – will this be preserved?
– Real heart of the system neither polygons nor rasters but an
ontology consisting of just four relational tables
– Who will archive this?
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Toponymic databases as a key resource
• GIS developed around data for which geographical
names were relatively unimportant
– Do any power pylons have individual names?
• Working with historical data means working with:
– Entities whose names change repeatedly
– Entities whose precise locations are unknown, but we know
hierarchic relationships
– Entities we cannot afford to map, but still need to hold
information for
• Lack of information on historical units a major
constraint on retrospective policy appraisal
– Danny Dorling (Sheffield): evaluating “estate action”
schemes, etc: many different programmes, each using ad
hoc definitions of programme areas, but no proper record
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Historical admin units: scale of the problem
• 1871 census reports list information for:
– Counties; Parliamentary Divisions and Parliamentary Boroughs;
Hides, Tythings, Hundreds, Wapentakes, Wards, etc.; Lieutenancy
Sub-Divisions; Petty Sessional Divisions; Police Divisions;
Highway Districts; Local Board Districts; Boroughs and Towns with
Improvement Commissioners under Local Acts; Civil Parishes and
Townships, and Extra-Parochial Places; Military Districts and SubDistricts; Post Office Districts; Inland Revenue Districts; Poor Law
Unions; Registration Districts and Sub-districts; Census
Enumeration Districts. (1871 Census Report, Appendix C: Territorial
Sub-Divisions of England, p.175)
• 1891 census report noted that ‘of the 14,926 Civil Parishes of
which the populations were given in the census returns of 1881,
no fewer than 3,258 had their boundaries affected in the course
of the next decennium’ (Vol. IV, General Report, p.2)
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Example:
Youngs’ Local
Administrative
Units of
England
Is this
“geographical
information”?
Is this “geospatial
information”?
27th October 2006
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
• Is this
“geographical
information”?
• Although
mark-up is
standardsbased (TEI),
not what
main-stream
text archives
expect
• Part of tightly
integrated
data structure
which is geospatial
(hence the
on-the-fly
map)
27th October 2006
Example: geo-referenced text
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Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Web sites, etc
• Vision of Britain:
www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
• Great Britain Historical GIS:
www.gbhgis.org
www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis
• Mailing list:
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/gbhgis
• Contact us:
gbhgis@port.ac.uk
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