Historical GIS in Great Britain
I just finished my oral exams and passed, so just that little hurdle of a dissertation between me and those three very expensive and time consuming letters: PhD. One of my main research areas is the use of GIS in historical research, and I thought it would be nice to highlight one of the first and probably most successful national efforts at a Historical GIS, the Great Britain Historical GIS. This project represents a decade at least of work by Ian Gregory and others to develop a spatial database of historical boundaries, historical census and other demographic data for Great Britain. The main portion of the Historical GIS is not publicly available, but there is a nice public site called A Vision of Britain Through Time, partially funded by lottery proceeds, that allows users to get online access to some of the place information, census data and historical maps and other digital datasets that were developed as part of the Great Britain Historical GIS. Although a number of projects relating to other countries, including the US, have been done or are underway, no other national Historical GIS has really gotten to the level of usage of the Great Britain project.
2 Replies to “Historical GIS in Great Britain”
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It would be interesting to know why most of GBHGIS is not publically available… as an archaeologist it would be incredibly useful to access this information through different interfaces other than the Vision of Britain website. Making it accessible through web services and similar would be so useful to so many people.
There is some confusion here. I have been director of the GB Historical GIS project from its inception in 1994 to the present, although many people have worked on it with me; Ian Gregory left the project in 2000. The web site “A Vision of Britain through Time” sits on top of our full system and gives access to pretty much the entire contents, apart from part of our statistical holdings. However, it was funded by the UK National Lottery as a resource for local historians and is, emphatically, not a download site. That said, pretty much all the boundaries we have computerised are downloadable from the UKBORDERS service operated by Edinburgh University, and most of the statistics can be obtained from the UK Data Archive at Essex University. Our scanned maps ARE available via an OGC-compliant web map server, and we are developing additional web services interfaces.
What is the source of your information?