Background to the Project

For the past six years, Dr Humphrey Southall has been directing the construction of the Great Britain Historical Database (GBHD). The project has progressed according to an ambitious historical and geographical aim: "to capture the changing boundaries of the major administrative areas of Britain and Ireland from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and link these to a major socio-economic database to allow the analysis and mapping of data for at least the last 150 years." Such a task, previously unthinkable because of its complexity and size, has become possible with the advances provided by information technology. Firstly, new technology allows historians to enter and record the huge amount of data provided by socio-economic evidence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Secondly, technology, in the form of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software, allows historians to ask questions of this data over geographical classifications that have evolved over time.

The project, open-ended in scope because of the huge amount of data involved, comprises four different strands.

* The technical development of the Geographical Information System over any type of data
* The assembly of a Geographical Information System specific to 19th and 20th century Britain, including the entry of the relevant boundary changes
* The entry of the relevant economic and social data within separate boundaries
* The final historical analysis of the data, using the GIS system

Finding funds for executing these divergent tasks (which occur in different locations, make use of different skills and happen at different times in the project) is a difficult task. Dr Southall has become something of an expert at organising funding for the GBHD, matching parts of the project with the concerns of different fund-awarding bodies. This includes exploiting the new technologies in the project to impress major funding agencies, making use of the smaller trusts to help fill gaps in funding, recognising where collaborations can provide assistance, and being aware of the best plans for writing the actual bids. While the nature of the GBHD has demanded certain types of funding, the routes established by Dr Southall for gaining this funding are useful knowledge for anyone pursing a digitisation project in the humanities.

Large-Scale Funding

At the beginning of the project, the GBHD had to rely on relatively small bids. (The chart demonstrates the complex nature of the funding for its first three of four years) As the dimensions of the project have widened, more ambitious bids have been submitted and accepted. Dr Southall was delighted to find that even the traditional funding bodies were willing to recognise projects involving digitised data. The largest grant (over £250,000 from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to cover two and a half-year's work) was based on the project's goals for preparing a digital record of 200 years worth of census data. The other major funders, the Wellcome Trust, have also shown their enthusiasm for the GIS system by making some sizeable contributions towards its development and application.

Figure 1 - Funding for the project for the years 1994 - 2000

Besides the major funding bodies, there also exist sources of funding that will help projects with a technical slant. Various schemes established by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) were helpful for the GBHD in this respect. Funding from the JISC's Special Collections in the Humanities allowed for some of the digital data to be placed online. Yet another project with an acronym, the JTAP Initiative (standing for JISC Technology Applications Programme) was the source of one of the project's larger grants. It allowed for a pilot research project to examine the possible development of electronic atlases as developed from the GIS system.

Because it gives the opportunity for new methodologies, the GIS system opens up new possibilities of research, and therefore funding. For example, it allows researchers to compare datasets from different eras of categorisation. Reform of mortality statistics in 1974 meant that the standard geographical category became 'town'. Data recorded between 1911 and 1974, however, was recorded according to 'urban district', and by 'registration district' before 1911. The geographical framework supplied by the GIS system allows the disparate records to be analysed as a unit. Historians and social scientists, therefore, now have a structure that allows them to write a narrative on mortality statistics for the entirety of the twentieth century. The GBHD has advertised this new research potential in a number of its funding bids.

Of course, such a project has drawbacks as well as advantages. In terms of funding, the crossover between subjects raises suspicion within funding bodies dedicated to particular areas of study. While the ESRC is now asking social scientists to include an historical perspective in their work, they are still wary of funding projects that go before 1850, as the GBHD does. The area before 1850 is more the preserve of the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy Humanities Research Board, of which the latter had supplied some financial assistance for the pre-modern aspects of the project. Such drawbacks are not major barriers, however. Funding bodies will ask interdisciplinary projects to amend their bids to suit their research ethos, rather than rejecting them outright. Social science bodies have provided large chunks of the GBHD's funding; financial help has also been collected from bodies directed towards humanities research.

Smaller Funding

Although the GBHD team has received considerable help from large-scale funding bodies, it has not ignored opportunities to apply for smaller sums from funding organisations. Rather than contributing to the project as a whole, such funding has been directed towards establishing or strengthening certain sections of the database. Receiving money from The Nuffield Foundation in 1996 allowed the project to concentrate on entering economic data on inter-war Britain. Likewise, income received a year later from the Population Investigation Committee, a research group based at the London School of Economics, allowed the project to enter statistics on migration patterns in Britain, also from between the wars. Obviously, for smaller funding organisations such as the last two, it was a case of preparing specific bids that related to the concerns of the funding bodies. The Nuffield Foundation, for example, supports projects that aim to advance educational or social welfare. In promising an analysis of 'the geography of distress in Inter-War Britain' this particular GBHD project slotted in to the aims of the Foundation.

However, smaller funding bodes cannot plug all the gaps in a particular project. One of the key features of the GIS is the mapping of sub-county boundaries. While it has been possible to achieve this for London parishes (thanks to funding gained in collaboration with the Centre for Metropolitan History), it has been a much more difficult task for non-urban areas, precisely because there are no specific funding bodies to cater for this kind of work. The project has had to navigate this problem by using the remains of other funding bids to plug in the gaps.

Collaborations

Much of the progress of the Great British Historical Database has been based not on securing financial support for itself, but by identifying and working with other groups embarked on similar research tasks. The success of an ESRC funding bid in 1998 allowed the members of the GBHD to combine with the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at the Queen's University of Belfast. The Queen's team had already developed an expertise in scanning nineteenth-century census data using Optical Character Recognition, i.e. entering the data electronically rather than manually. Work already completed on Irish census reports (around 32m data values) could therefore be added to the database, and work under progress, on other census material from around Great Britain, could be incorporated into the GBHD at a quicker pace. The inclusion of Irish data and the acceleration in the data entry of other censuses further widened the scope of the project. Dr Southall could now envisage a GIS-based atlas of the United Kingdom with the boundary markers corresponding to those used in the first census, in 1801. This would not have been possible without the GBHD pursuing possible collaborations.

The GBHD worked with other teams when planning and submitting bids. The Centre for Metropolitan History was one such example. Dr Southall was on the Centre's committee, and also part of a semi-formal group that discussed the best approaches for organising bids. In particular the group focussed on one substantial bid to the Wellcome Trust to map London boundary changes, an aspect of the project that was considered essential because of the opportunities it could provide for scholarly research.

Of course in a project as large as the GBHD, not all possible connections have been fully followed up. This has been largely circumstantial rather than deliberate. Links with the existing GIS community have been poor, mainly because it is largely located with archaeology departments rather than historical or geographical ones. However, Dr Southall hopes this will be remedied when the project shifts home base to Portsmouth University (for which see below).

Partnerships have not been restricted to higher education. The digitisation of census information was especially interesting to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and support from them helped add to the standing of the project. The relationship also offered more concrete assistance in terms of funding. The ONS' Deputy Director for Census Statistics supported bids made by Dr Southall and other project members. Dr Southall believes this, along with another reference supplied by English Heritage, added a good deal of weight to their successful bid to the ESRC.

Collaborations with other bodies, whether in the higher education sector or not, has given Dr Southall other responsibilities. The ONS has asked him to sit on one of their committees, while the Wellcome Trust has employed him as an external assessor. While he has been happy to do this, such responsibilities leave him less time for his own work.

Other non-academic organisations have shown a desire to supply data to the project; among them the Public Record Office, the National Register of Archives, as well as English Heritage. The interest of such public bodies has lain in providing documentation for the project, thus helping catalogue the data that the academics have been placing in the database. Dr Southall did point out, however, that the intellectual answers the project was throwing up tended to disturb the usual distinction between data and metadata, thus raising questions about what kind of help the public bodies can provide. It therefore needs a good amount of preliminary discussion before such a relationship can be exploited. Because of their differing public responsibilities, the needs of the archival sector vary from those of academics. Tools for interpreting and understanding need to be pitched at the different levels. To Dr Southall, this suggests not that the project should continue its own academic aims. Rather, its sheer scale in terms of its contents and its possible employment by a wider general public means that it should eventually be directed from outside the academic environment.

Home Institutions

A different type of collaboration has been that between the project and its home university. The Great British Historical Database has now become resident at Portsmouth University, employing Dr Southall and one other member of the team. Dr Southall was quick to point out the advantages of working within the helpful academic conditions Portsmouth aims to provide. As a university-wide strategy, Portsmouth is now supporting research interests in GIS activity. The strategy has included investment in the necessary hardware and software, as well as the establishment of technical staff to support those creating GIS-based projects. Dr Southall believes that transferring the project to Portsmouth is therefore a major boost for the GBHD, as it will no longer have to worry about financing all of its technological needs. With Portsmouth paying the project's overheads, the Great British Historical Database is situated in an environment that permits the project to flourish.

Additionally, Portsmouth University is helping fund various sub-projects. Along with financial assistance from some smaller trusts, Portsmouth is funding the recruitment of a third team member to build a historical gazetteer linked to the GIS. The University has offered team member Dr Ian Gregory a four-year fellowship to pursue his own research using the database and GIS system. On a more general level, the institutional support provided by Portsmouth has also been important in persuading other possible funders that the organisational infrastructure and individual will necessary to continue the project is very much in existence.

Flexibility in Funding

While the Great Britain Historical Database has achieved many funding successes, there have also been some failures. Failures can often be quite time-consuming, especially when the funding body is initially ambiguous about the chances of success; Dr Southall's experience has been that many organisations have shown an initial interest in bids, asked for the GBHD to refine it, and then, after further consultation, rejected it. One bid to a major funding body for the development of a census atlas was initially well received, but then the process decelerated, until the bid was finally turned down. Only when the bid was drastically amended - reducing the amount applied for to a tenth of the original - did the GBHD actually receive any help. Presenting amended bids has its problems as well. Occasionally, the GBHD has applied for too small an amount of money, and particular projects have not been completed. It can be sometime be a more sensible decision to forego particular funding opportunities.

In other cases, perhaps because of their complexity or the lack of expectations, bids have not been completed. Alternatively, bids have been rejected because there has been a lack of research done. The lesson is perhaps not to spread oneself too thinly; a smaller number of quality bids is more worthwhile than a greater number of bids with less depth. There is another reason for reducing the amount of bids penned. Dr Southall has been painfully aware that he has spent too much time organising bids, and not enough time engaged in academic research. Administering a project such as the GBHD takes up a great deal of time.

Because of the relatively precarious financial nature of the project, Dr Southall has always been aware of the need to generate alternative sources of funding. Selling their expertise in GIS systems was one method. During a difficult time in funding, Dr Southall and Dr Gregory organised an historical GIS training course for researchers who wanted to learn how to use the GIS system. Such was its success that it was repeated a year later. The project, as well as gaining significant income from running the workshops, advertised the GIS to an international audience - academics from Canada, Norway and the USA (as well as the UK) attended the course.

Writing Bids

Dr Southall has written countless bids to fund the Great British Historical Database. He has been occasionally surprised by some of the results - well-researched and well-thought out bids have failed where less well-developed bids have succeeded. Nevertheless, Dr Southall believes there are some key points to bear in mind when composing bids for large-scale projects, and, to conclude with, these are listed below.

1 While each section of the application form needs careful attention, the short summary describing the project is perhaps the most important section. In bids where applicants are invited to write both short and long synopses, too many concentrate on the lengthy explanation of the project's aims, chronologies, methodologies etc. This is to the detriment of a more straightforward description of the project, often read by a much higher number of the funding body's committee. Adding a bullet point list to the short summary can also be very helpful, emphasising the fundamentals of the bid.
2 Likewise, many bids pay more attention to lengthy academic exposition and neglect budgeting. Funding bodies increasingly want value for the money they are distributing. Exhibiting financial sense in a professional budget is a persuasive element.
3 As mentioned above, Dr Southall included user references from the Office for National Statistics' Deputy Director for Census Statistics in a successful bid of 1998 to the ESRC. Including such references often appears as an optional extra in application forms, and are therefore left out. But demonstrating support from outwith one's immediate academic environment adds much to a bid's credibility, especially if one can show how the resource will benefit general users.
4 Flexibility. Bids submitted by the GBHD that were initially turned down were transformed into successful, if smaller, bids. One of the initial bids made to the Leverhulme Trust in 1996 was far too ambitious, but succeeded when some pragmatic adjustments were adopted. Successful applicants must be careful, however, of trying to stretch the smaller funding to fit the bid's original aims.

The Great Britain Historical Database is available from AHDS History at [http://hds.essex.ac.uk/gbh.asp] .
Once they have registered, users can access parts of the database relevant to their work.

Thanks to Cressida Chapell and Humphrey Southall
for their help in composing this case study.

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