We report on two JISC-funded projects that aimed to enrich the metadata of digitized historical collections with georeferences and other information automatically computed using geoparsing and related information extraction technologies. Understanding location is a critical part of any historical research, and the nature of the collections makes them an interesting case study for testing automated methodologies for extracting content. The two projects (GeoDigRef and Embedding GeoCrossWalk) have looked at how automatic georeferencing of resources might be useful in developing improved geographical search capacities across collections. In this paper, we describe the work that was undertaken to configure the geoparser for the collections as well as the evaluations that were performed.
The North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) brings together complete-count census data from late-nineteenth-century Canada, Great Britain, Iceland, Norway, and the United States into a single harmonized database. When released in 2005, the final version of the database will include the records of nearly 90 million people. The project will consistently code all variables across the different countries, while still retaining important national variation in census questions and responses. The authors provide a brief history of the project, discuss the main issues involved in creating a harmonized international census database, and outline the methodological and research opportunities the completed database will provide for scholars.
This article discusses the importance of classifying occupations both to the original collectors of the occupational data contained within the late-nineteenth century censuses and to present-day historians with particular reference to the 1881 censuses of England and Wales. It describes the method by which occupational data was collected and prepared for classifiation in 1881. It shows that the classifications of occupations in the 1881 were remarkably similar to a present-day recoding exercise and concludes that the rules laid down by the Census Office in 1881 for the tabulation of occupations were acted on as well as possible by the contemporary clerks. The final section demonstrates these results and explains why differences might have occurred.
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