Constructing a vision of Britain through time: integrating old maps, census reports, travel writing, and much else, into an online historical atlas

This chapter provides a short overview of the structure and contents of the Great Britain Historical GIS, and of the web site based on it, "A Vision of Britain through Time". Following a similar organisation to the three longer papers published in "Historical Methods" (2011-14), it discusses first how statistical data are all held in a single database table, with one data value per row and other columns recording date, location, topic and source. Next it describes the ontology of administrative units to which both statistical and digital boundary data are linked. Finally it describes how less formal information, such as travel writing, is held for "places", and the resulting user experience provided by the web site. The conclusion draws five lessons for other online historical GIS and atlas projects.