Bringing historical data into the 21st century

UK-- Historians at the University of Essex are hoping to provide social researchers with a brand new perspective by bringing data from the 19th and early 20th centuries into the 21st.

The project to bring together 60 years of census data is led by a team at the University of Essex's history department and is supported by a £1m grant from the Economic and Social Research Council.

It has been made possible through an agreement with family history sites including findmypast.com, whereby they will give the team access to their data in return for access to the finished product.

Information from the 1851-1911 censuses is available online through commercial sites allowing people to research their family history. But Professor Kevin Schürer, who is leading the project, says the data needs to be repurposed before it can be of value to academics.

“The things that are online have been designed for family historians and genealogists,” says Schürer. “That kind of service is fine if you're doing small-scale research looking for named individuals, but if you're an academic you ask very different questions, and you could never ask those questions of the current databases.”

Another problem is that the current transcripts reflect exactly what was written by hand on the original form, without taking into account abbreviations, variations of language and ambiguities in geographical terms. Schürer's team plans to codify the handwritten entries to make them consistent and fully searchable.

“This is a historical resource – the majority of use will be to do historical research,” says Schürer. “That said, the census is the key source for the 19th century that looks at issues to do with demography, household structure, economic and social structure. The debates about many of the burning economic and social issues today are lacking a real historical dimension. This will enable people looking at current policy issues to put a long-term dimension on it.”

The data will be available to academic researchers, and Schürer sees opportunities for partnerships with organisations who can help make the most of it, such as the British Library and the National Archives.

If the three-year project is successful, the next step could be to combine the 10-yearly snapshots provided by census data with the “moving picture” revealed by records of births, marriages and deaths.

Author: Robert Bain

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£1m grant to link 60 years of census data