1998-1999

Funding from the British Academy under their Small Grant Programme faciliated the computerisation of the 1676 Compton Census on religious adherence. The work has allowed Dr Ell to further his research examining changes in religious geographies between 1676 and 1851. This is an extension of his Cambridge book on religious geographies in 1851.

The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) is a searchable online historical dictionary of the Scottish language as written and spoken by lowland Scots in Scotland and Ulster from the 12th century onward. The DSL database combines the entries from the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), which covers the language up until the end of the 17th century, and the Scottish National Dictionary (SND), which spans the 18th century to the present. The project received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Resource Enhancement Scheme, with partnership funding provided by Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd. and the Russell Trust. The DSL website describes the project and provides full public access to the dictionary. Searches may be restricted to various aspects of the dictionary entries, such as: geographical label; quotation text; author; etymology; or date. Standard search results return the word plus its surrounding entries. This is undoubtedly a useful online reference work, which should be of great assistance to scholars researching Scottish literature and culture. This resource can also be ordered via the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) website (formerly part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS)), on completion of a request access form.

In April 1998 we received a grant for £260,300 from the Economic and Social Research Council to construct an historical GIS for the British Isles. The award was made to three Universities. The Belfast team were responsible for populating the GIS with statistical data, much of it drawn from the decennial censuses. Our colleagues in the Department of Geography at the University of Portsmouth constructed digital boundary data for the GIS. Our collaborator in the Department of Geography at the University of Leeds was responsible for the cartographic representation of the work, which will result in an Atlas celebrating the bi-centenary of the first modern British census in 1801.

Although the ESRC grant has now come to an end, we are using the resource for research and the project is being used as a foundation for our grant application to the New Opportunities Fund to create an electronic historical atlas for Great Britain.

We assisted researchers involved in this research during 1998 and received additional funding in 1999 to carry out further work. The project involved the OCR'ing of printed Hearth Tax Returns for several English counties and the post-processing of the material into a format suitable for analysis using the computer cartographic software MAPINFO.