AddressingHistory Phase 2

Title

AddressingHistory

Duration

October 2010 – Ongoing

Website

AddressingHistory

Summary

The JISC-Funded AddressingHistory project Phase 1 (Apr.10 - Sept.10) was led by the EDINA at the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the National Library of Scotland. It created a online crowdsourcing tool and API which enables a broad spectrum of users (particularly local and family history groups, and genealogists) to combine data from digitised historical Scottish Post Office Directories (POD) for Edinburgh (1785, 1865, 1905 in the first instance), with contemporaneous historical maps. The technologies deployed are scalable for the full collection of 670 Post Office Directories covering the whole of Scotland.

Phase 2 funding sought to develop functionality complementary to the original work and to broaden geographic coverage of content. Work included spatial searching, enhancing the parsing process which assigns a geo-reference to POD entries (utilising the Google geocoding utility). Multiple addresses (i.e. entries where individuals may have a domestic address and one or more business addresses) were also made explicit for searching purposes.

POD configuration files (used to configure the parser settings) were externalized thus rules required to successfully parse the POD content can be augmented and refined (so that a user can add a repeated anomaly found within the structure of a POD). We also plan to 'externalise' the parsing tool - thus a user wishing to geo-reference a POD (for an area of the country or era not covered by the tool & API) will have the ability to do so.

Additional content for Edinburgh as well as Glasgow and Aberdeen (1881, 1891) to coincide with census (and an inter-census) years, and a mobile Augmented Reality Application were released in 2012.

Project Deliverables

The Web 2.0 enabled AddressingHistory tool which will contribute to crowd sourcing through the georeferencing of historical addresses.
Increased community awareness and engagement with the digitised maps and Post Office directories at the core of this project.
An API onto the crowd-sourced data.
A sustainable exit strategy for the data created by users for AddressingHistory.