We have secured the services of two  University of Edinburgh PhD students (theses submitted), Marc Di Tommasi and Tawny Paul,  for the next couple of weeks to assist with geo-parsing Scottish Post Office Directories (PODs). Their work involves identifying and cleaning entries in the XML POD data files (through OCR inaccuracies, inappropriate line breaks, inaccurate geo-references from mass geo-coding exercise, cross-referencing old streetnames with modern equivilant etc) and feeding this back into configuration files which can, in turn be used to refine future POD parsing exercises. Further details regarding the geo-parsing exercise and how it will impact on genealogists and local historians, in addition to further AddressingHistory tool refinement will follow shortly so watch this space!

Stuart Macdonald

AddressingHistory Project Manager