Great Britain Historical GIS project

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System is a unique digital collection of information about Britain's localities as they have changed over time. Information comes from census reports, historical gazetteers, travellers' tales and historic maps, assembled into a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts.

Project

Academic field
History
Affiliation
University of Portsmouth
Project link
Great Britain Historical GIS project
Funders
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
Wellcome Trust
Marc Fitch Fund
English Heritage
Aurelius Trust
Pilgrim Trust
Big Lottery Fund
British Library
Environment Agency
Frederick Soddy Trust
Natural England
Nuffield Foundation
Population Investigation Committee
Roehampton Institute
Department for Environment
Food and Rural Affairs
Economic and Social Research Council
The Leverhulme Trust
TaDiRAH
Meta: Project Management

arts-humanities.net

Principal project staff
Dr Humphrey Southall
Start date
Sunday, January 1, 1989
Source material
Historical statistics - on census reports, data on births, marriages and deaths, and unemployment and poor law statistics. 10m. words of text: of accounts of journeys around Britain cross-referenced by place to the rest of our system; over 90,000 entries from descriptive gazetteers published in the late 19th century, describing towns, villages and landmarks; and the main report from every census up to 1961.
Data formats
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
JPEG File Interchange Format (JPG)
Structured Query Language (SQL)
Extensible Markup Language (XML) TEI-compliant
Metadata standards
Dublin Core
simple (DC)
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)