2002-2003

Many countries have spent large sums of money creating GISs containing historical of census and related data. While there has been heavy investment in building these systems, our knowledge of how to analyse the data held within them remains limited. The primary difficulty is how to analyse spatio-temporal change without having to unduly simplify the spatial, temporal or attribute components of the data to handle the impact of changing administrative geographies. This project represents a first attempt to do this. It performs a spatio-temporal analysis of the impacts of the Great Irish Famine covering the period 1841 to 1871 by focusing on the use of two techniques in particular: areal interpolation to allow us to perform direct comparisons of data published using different administrative units, and geographically weighted regression to enable us to examine how the impact of the famine varied across Ireland.

An award of close to £29,000 was made by ESRC under their Research Methods Programme in 2004.

A Vision of Britain through Time brings together historical surveys of Britain to create a record of how the country and its localities have changed.

The Act of Union Virtual Library is a unique collection of pamphlets, newspapers, parliamentary papers and manuscript material contemporary with the 1800 Act of Union between Ireland and Britain. The entire content is searchable bibliographically, the search results displaying individual images that can be browsed by turning the pages of each virtual book or document. A free text search is provided for the pamphlets and parliamentary papers.

The website is of inestimable use for scholars in that it provides immediate access to a panoply of documents held in various public institutions in Belfast, more often than not, in specialised collections. Those with a more general interest in the Act of Union will also benefit both from exposure to these archives and to the myriad search functions and explanatory notes contained within the website.

CDDA received funding from Edinburgh University to digitise the 1,500+ pages of the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland. We used full correction OCR techniques for this work. The corrected text has been passed to the University of Portsmouth to add markup before making the Gazetteer available over the web.

The Great Britain Historical GIS Project charts the changing boundaries of civil parishes from the mid-nineteenth century. During this period ecclesiastical parish boundaries increasingly varied from those of their civil counterparts. Professor KDM Snell submitted a grant application to the British Academy to plot these divergencies. CDDA was a partner in this project funded by the British Academy.