Paula Aucott

Since my arrival in Portsmouth I have been part of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project team. During that time I have contributed to numerous research projects including the lottery-funded creation of the local history website “A Vision of Britain through Time”, which presents the history of Great Britain through places over the last 200 years. In 2007 I became team leader for a JISC-funded project which expanded this website. Since then I have project managed various smaller projects and have worked on a range of consultancy projects.

• Historical GIS - the development of vector GIS material for use with statistics in creating long-running time series for national, regional and local level statistical mapping
• Administrative Unit ontologies and Historical Gazetteers - the creation and refinement of a structure used to support the use of multiple administrative unit hierarchies and an administrative unit gazetteer within a single database system
• Historical Land Use - several smaller grants have involved pilot projects evaluating surviving data, creating and editing digital content, and investigating the suitability of automated analysis tools for use with raster images of historical land utilisation maps
• Medieval Landscapes - my thesis focused on using modern spatial analysis techniques to re-examine documentary evidence surviving from the later medieval period.

I graduated from the University of Birmingham, and have an MA from the University of Leicester. I also hold an MSc in Geographical Information Systems and a PhD in Geography from the University of Portsmouth.