AHDS History News
AHDS History Scoping Study
Following the removal of funding for AHDS History by the AHRC and JISC from April 2008, an internal survey is being carried out to inform the UK Data Archive of what should succeed this service.
New Intute Internet tutorials for Arts and Humanities
Intute has just released eight new FREE internet tutorials for the Arts and Humanities including Internet for History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) By Dr. David J Mossley et al, Leeds University.
AHDS has a new blog
AHDS has launched a new blog that offers Digital Resource News from the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Just follow the link to explore: http://blogs.ahds.ac.uk/
IHR peer review and evaluation of digital resources in the arts and humanities project
AHDS History were commissioned by the IHR to act as a consultant to the IHR/RHS 'Peer review and evaluation of digital resources in the arts and humanities project' and to produce guidelines to assist the project in constructing conclusions. The report produced by AHDS History makes a number of generic proposals to establish a system of peer review of electronic resources. These generic proposals take the form of a series of recommendations which predominantly deal with the functionality and usability of any web-based resource, alongside a series of guidelines relating to the modelling of the data within the system. The final report 'Academic and technical reviews of historical digital resources' as submitted to the IHR is now available.
Historical GIS Seminars
During 2007 the ESRC is sponsoring a number of free seminars on the use of GIS (Geographical Information System) to study the past. Our next seminar will be held in London in October 2007. For further information and booking forms see Historical GIS Research Network.
The Association for History and Computing UK (AHC-UK) is offering free membership for the AHC-UK to all PhD students who attend these seminars. They will also be offering a £25 bursary towards travelling costs for one PhD student at each outreach seminar. Every PhD student who is offered a place at a seminar will automatically be considered for the bursary.
Punched Card Reader at the University of Essex
As part of the preparation for the History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1660-1690, records relating to the appointment and dismissal of justices of the peace were computerized and stored on 80 column punched cards. These included the Crown Office docket books which recorded the names of people added to, or removed from, the previous commission of the peace, and the list in the Privy Council Minute Book for December 1686 of recommended changes. The punched cards were stored at the History of Parliament Trust, and an index of the entries, arranged alphabetically by surname, deposited with what was then the Public Record Office. Unfortunately, as punched cards, and punched card readers, became obsolete the ability to extract the data was lost. However, the data contained on these cards will soon be made available to the research community once again. AHDS History along with the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex has recently purchased a Cardmation CF300 punched card reader, and successfully read the surviving punched cards. Once the cards had been fed through the reader, Cardmation’s Winread software transferred the data into a simple text file with a single line of text representing the data from a single card. We are now confident that we can read most varieties of 80 column punch-cards, and are willing to undertake for a small fee, reading of cards containing data of interest to historians and social scientists. For further details email: info@ahds.ac.uk |  |
 | Launch of the beta version of the Online Historical Population Reports Website A collection of British Historical Population Reports |
In March 2004 the JISC funded AHDS History for a three year project to create a web-based user interface for browsing, searching, viewing and downloading almost 200,000 images of historical population reports.
The project completed will include the digitisation of almost 600 volumes of census reports, reports of the various Registrar-General's and other associated statistical material emanating from both the English and Scottish General Registrar Offices and their predecessors. The overwhelming body of material will be from the period 1801-1931 though there will be some exceptions. All textual material will be searchable, and many tables will be available in machine-readable format.
Following the successful completion of the usability testing of an alpha version of this website, a beta version www.histpop.org was launched in July 2006.
For further information see Online Historical Population Reports
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