Presenting places: connecting with, and preserving, the past

Research by geographers at Portsmouth has pioneered the creation of accessible and searchable digital web databases that reflect how places have changed with time. These have been used directly by national and international libraries to improve access to their archives and collections, and to extend their services.

 

Issue

Gazetteers organise knowledge and details about named places; used with maps or an atlas, they link geographical names with spatial co-ordinates. Gazetteer‐based services are applied in fields such as public health, natural history data management and cultural history, but their value is frequently limited by the need to know about places whose locations may be uncertain or whose names may have evolved over time.

 

Approach

The research team led the rebuilding of the Great Britain Historical GIS (GBHGIS), a spatially enabled database that documents and visualises the changing human geography of the British Isles over the last 200 years.

Through ‘A Vision of Britain through Time’, the team established digital gazetteers as a central research focus in the digital humanities.

The ‘GB1900’ project is the largest historical gazetteer in the world.

 

Impact

The research has changed the way in which national and international libraries think about their geographical resources and prompted them to reconsider how geographical content within their collections can be discovered and searched. For example, the database enabled the National Library of Scotland to create a map of the boundaries of parishes, countries and unitary authorities in Scotland which has seen over 63,000 page views.

The ‘GB1900’ project pioneered the geographical application of ‘citizen science’ in this context, working with volunteer transcribers, recruiting over 1,000 online volunteers.

Cymru1900 geo-located over 294,000 transcriptions of text and contributed to the List of Historic Place Names of Wales which has raised public awareness of the legacy of historic places in Wales.

The research also assisted a ‘citizen geography’ campaign by the Ramblers Association in which the public compared historic and modern maps to identify paths missing from the modern rights of way network. Over a six week period, 154,298 1km² squares of England and Wales were reviewed by 3,447 volunteers. As a result of the campaign, more than 49,000 miles of missing rights of way have been identified.

 

More information

• Read the full impact case study in the REF21 database

• Geography and environmental studies - University of Portsmouth

Institution: University of Portsmouth

Researchers: Professor Humphrey Southall, Paula Aucott, Michael Stone