Great Britain Historical GIS

  • Southall, Humphrey (PI)
  • Aucott, Paula (Team Member)
  • Stoner, Michael (Team Member)
  • Westwood, John (Team Member)
  • Von Luenen, Alexander (Team Member)
  • Granville, Rachel (Team Member)
  • Battaglia, A. Decio (Team Member)
  • Nicholls, Alexandra (Team Member)
  • Burton, Nick (Team Member)
  • Pearson, Neil (Team Member)
  • Richardson, Gudrun (Team Member)
  • Gregory, Ian (Team Member)
  • Garrett, Eilidh (Team Member)
  • Gilham, Vicki L. (Team Member)
  • Bennett, Chris (Team Member)
  • White, Ben (Team Member)

    Project Details

    Description

    The mission of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project is to provide a systematic spatial framework for historical information about Britain. "Historical" means that we are focused on documentary evidence, not on archaeological finds, so we work with extensive "places" and administrative units, not precise points on the ground - but dates are usually precise. We work only with sources which cover the whole or large parts of Britain, but these include statistics, boundary information, historical maps and even travel writing.

    Although our mission is self-defined, the project has had collaborative relationships with the Office for National Statistics, the National Archives, the British Library, English Heritage, the Environment Agency and many academic partners. Total funding since 1994 is approximately £2.1m.

    Our original work was entirely focused on historical statistics - on census reports, data on births, marriages and deaths, and on unemployment and poor law statistics. The resulting system, developed in London between 1994 and 1999, loosely linked a record of changing administrative boundaries, managed using ArcInfo software, to our existing database which held millions of statistical data values in hundreds of tables.

    In 2000 we moved to a new base at the University of Portsmouth. Since 2001 we have built a completely new system, now held in Postgres and PostGIS, designed both to remove limitations of the original system and to hold a much broader range of the content. The central focus of the project is on the development of our GIS as a national resource. However, there have been a series of associated major research projects, details of which are linked to this project. We make the majority of our material available via our publicly accessible website.

    Layperson's description

    A framework of historical information about Great Britain held together by location.
    Short titleGB Historical GIS
    AcronymGBHGIS
    StatusActive
    Effective start/end date1/01/94 → …

    Keywords

    • Historical GIS
    • Local history
    • Statistics
    • Boundary mapping
    • re-districting
    • Historical mapping

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