Category Archives: AddressingHistory

AddressingHistory Update

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The waiting is finally over! The AddressingHistory team are pleased to announce that the remodeled AddressingHistory crowdsourcing tool is now available. We have added six further Post Office Directories to the collection for the years 1881 and 1891 (to coincide with census years) and extended the geographic coverage to include the cities of Aberdeen and Glasgow in addition to Edinburgh.

The tool itself has been refashioned with refined parsing capabilities incorporated. Searches can now be made across those instances of records with multiple addresses, those records with multiple addresses also being editable. Spatial searching can now also be conducted using a bounding box facility and the searching of professions has been enhanced by assigning Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes to Professions.

As mentioned in a previous blog post you can now explore an “Augmented Reality” version of AddressingHistory using your iPhone or Android device.  Currently this is for Edinburgh only but plans are afoot to extend this to other geographies within the web tool.

In addition to new features and functionality it is now possible for requests to be made for a new POD to be added to AddressingHistory.  Once a request for a new POD has been made we can either provide assistance in using our POD parser (this requires some time and technical knowledge) to convert the requested POD, or we will add that POD to our priority list for future AddressingHistory development.

We are currently evaluating possible business models for sustainability and would like to hear of any ideas or initiatives that could feed into this exercise.

Please get in contact and let us know what you think.

Stuart Macdonald
AddressingHistory Project Manager

Programme Now Available for Geospatial in the Cultural Heritage Domain – Past, Present & Future

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We are delighted to announce our final programme for the Geospatial in the Cultural Heritage Domain, Past, Present & Future (#geocult) event which takes place next week, Wednesday 7th March 2012, at the Maughan Library, Kings College London.

A fantastic programme of speakers will explore the use of geospatial data and tools in cultural heritage projects with breakout discussions and unconference sessions providing opportunity for networking and further discussion of this exciting area.

We are delighted to announce that our speakers for the day will include:

Humphrey Southall of the University of Portsmouth will talk about OldMaps online, which just launched today at the Locating the Past (#geopast) event in London.

Stuart Dunn from Kings College London, talking about the new Digital Exposures of English Place Names (DEEP) project which is building a gazeteer that tracks the changing nature of place names.

Chris Fleet of the National Library of Scotland, and co-author of Scotland: Mapping a Nation, will talk about recent developments at the NLS.

Claire Grover of University of Edinburgh will talk about the new Digging Into Data project Trading Consequences which will use data mining techniques to investigate the economic and environment impact of 19th century trading.

Natalie Pollecutt from the Wellcome Library will be talking about their project: Medical Officers of Health (MOH) Reports for London 1848-1972 which is building a free online data set on public health in London.

Michael Charno, Digital Archivist and web developer at the Archaeology Data Service, will talk about Grey Literature and spatial technologies.

Stuart Nicol of the University of Edinburgh will talk about Visualising Urban Geographies, a recent project to create geospatial tools for historians.

Jamie McLauglin from the University of Sheffield will talk about Locating Londons Past, a website which allows you to search digital resources on early modern and eighteenth-century London, and to map the results.

Stuart Macdonald of University of Edinburgh will talk about AddressingHistory, a website and crowdsourcing project to geospatially reference historical post office directory data.

Sam Griffiths of University College London, will talk about “Classifying historical business directory data: issues of translation between geographical and ethnographic contributions to a community PPGIS (Public Participation GIS) project�.

Kate Jones of the University of Portsmouth will talk about Stepping Into Time, a project to bring World War Two bomb damage maps into the real world by using web and mobile mapping technology.

We will also be welcoming Rebekkah Abraham and Michael Daley from We Are What We Do to talk about HistoryPin, a website and mobile app which enables you to browse and add historical images to a map of the world, exploring the past through georeferenced photographs.

The detailed programme for the day can be found on our Eventbrite page where you can also book your free place at this event. Bookings close on Friday 2nd March 2012 so book soon!

We will also be live blogging, tweeting and recording this event so do also keep an eye on the blog here, the #geocult hashtag, and on our Geospatial in the Cultural Heritage Domain – Past, Present & Future page where you will be able to access materials after the event.

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An Update on Development and a Super Blog Post on Historical Affluence in Edinburgh

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We’ve been hinting on the blog for a while that we hope to bring you some improvements to AddressingHistory and we are finally able to bring you more news on those developments…

Earlier this year we kicked off several months work (using internal funds) to improve AddressingHistory with our developer, George, currently working on some very clever ways to improve the way address information from the directories is parsed (understood by machine) that will help us to present historical directory information more clearly and more accurately. The work will address some of the feedback we have had on AddressingHistory since we launched and it should mean that it is much easier to find your way around the maps and lists of search results.

We are not only improving what is already in place but we are also hoping to add some new directories including several fom cities outside of Edinburgh – one of which we know a lot of AddressingHistory users will be pleased to see. We can’t tell you more for now but we are confident you will be able to see a really positive difference once the changes are rolled out later this year. Keep an eye on this blog for updates over the coming months.

Finally we were delighted to see a post by Dr Peter Mattews, a lecturer at the School of the Built Environment at Heriot Watt University, on his excellent Urbanity and History blog.  Peter recently found out about AddressingHistory through his Twitter account and decided to use it to look at the distribution of advocates in Edinburgh and how that changes with the development of the New Town. His blog post “Historical development and concentrations of affluence” includes some more background and some screen shots of the maps he created through AddressingHistory.

We love to hear about how you are using AddressingHistory and are always happy to feature research and interesting discoveries here on the blog so please do leave comments here, let us know about your own blog posts and websites or get in touch via email (addressing.history@ed.ac.uk) if you have a story to share.