JISC

July 2009: The project is now complete and the electoral history and boundary data cited below has been added to the existing Vision of Britain website.

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The project

From 1994 to 2000 the Great Britain Historical GIS project mapped many of historical administrative boundaries of the UK and, more recently, National Lottery funds helped to create the Vision of Britain through Time website. Three major gaps remain in the boundary mapping which is the foundation of the whole structure which this project particular project has filled:

• Scanning a comprehensive library of original historic boundary maps
• Building a new sequence of digital maps showing the changing system of parliamentary constituencies
• Raising the limited coverage of Scotland up to the same standard as England and Wales

The central focus is on boundaries for parliamentary constituencies, and these have been be used as a framework for presenting British election statistics for 1832-1954. They are all available on the open access Vision of Britain website where new coverage of political life will link constituency boundaries and voting statistics to deliver a systematic and accessible record of franchise reform and voting behaviour.

The Vision of Britain website has a very large potential contribution to university teaching and learning because it holds consistent information on a very large number of localities, and users can find which historical constituencies covered a location by typing a postcode or clicking on a map. While the system’s mapping abilities may appeal mainly to geographers, this cornucopia of local material is of interest to historians, sociologists, political scientists and even literary studies: our collection of travellers’ tales is unique in enabling access by location. Not just a resource for university research and teaching, Vision of Britain has already established itself as a popular site for British history, attracting about 50,000 unique users per month.

The content

Map collections digitised include:

• St. Catharine’s House Historic Map Library (553 maps)
• Scottish administrative boundaries (80 maps)
• Reports of the Parliamentary Boundary Commissions, 1832 to 1954 (932 pages)

Here digitisation also means vectorisation, and election statistics are another major component of the project which the website will present as maps, graphs and tables. Despite the small numbers of scans, the resulting web resources will be large, as well as heavily used: the existing Vision of Britain site contains 'about 304,000 pages' according to Google and, under this project, at least 20,000 more will be added.

The process

Maps are scanned then geo-referenced by overlaying boundary maps on an existing set of New Popular one inch sheets, which were published in the 1940s and include National Grid lines. Parish-to-constituency relationships are then added to the administrative gazetteer and used to generate an initial vector map of constituencies by merging parishes. The initial map is then exported from Oracle to GIS software and overlaid on scanned constituency maps for manual addition of those constituency boundaries which did not follow parish boundaries. These methods create digital maps in which boundaries in different administrative layers that followed identical lines on the ground exactly match in the computer.

The future

Teaching and learning resources to be developed by the project combine a printed teachers’ pack demonstrating potential use of the system by a range of disciplines, and emphasising projects large and small, with eight online tutorials. The website is almost indefinitely extensible and possible future projects include adding similar content for the rest of Europe and incorporating the Domesday Book.

Download the project plan and final report