This is a joint project between the University of Portsmouth, the National Library of Scotland and four Welsh partners: the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic
Studies, the National Library of Wales and the People’s Collection Wales.
The aim is, through crowd-sourcing, to transcribe all the names on the 2nd Edition Ordnance Survey "County Series” six inch maps of the whole of Great Britain, and to make the resulting gazetteer freely available. A press release is here:
If any of this sounds a little familiar, it is because GB1900 is based on the earlier Cymru1900Wales project. If you go to the GB1900 site, you will see it is claiming over 300,000 names transcribed and over 400 volunteers at work, and this is because
it inherits all the contents from Cymru1900. However, this is not just a re-branding:
== Cymru1900 worked with six inch map scans of Wales already licensed from a commercial supplier. GB1900 works with a quite different and higher quality set of scans covering the whole of Great Britain, created by the National Library of Scotland.
== Cymru1900 gathered a lot of transcriptions, but very few were re-transcribed for confirmation. The software has been modified to make the need for confirmatory transcriptions clearer, the process simpler and the results much more visual. Incidentally,
this means that although it is now hard to find new names to transcribe in Wales, there is a great deal of work to be done there confirming the existing transcriptions: turn those markers from green to purple!
== While Cymru1900 ran somewhere “in the cloud”, GB1900 runs on a server in Portsmouth.
WHY DO THIS?
Gazetteers which tell you where towns and villages are/were are plentiful, but those County Series maps include names for just about every farm, wood and many parts of settlements. We are asking volunteer transcribers to gather every piece of text on each
map, other than purely numerical strings, so we will also be including, at least in the raw data, many “Waterfalls”, Brickworks” and so on. Based on how many names were gathered by the Welsh project, our guess is that the final harvest will be around 3 million
“names”.
It is worth explaining why two existing resources don’t meet this need:
— The DEEP project created the Historical Gazetteer of England's Place-Names (
http://www.placenames.org.uk) from the reports of the English Place Names Survey and offering "four million+ historical
place-name forms". That means it is based on real place name scholarship, but it has two big limitations considered simply as a finding aid for places: the EPNS is far from complete, with several counties not even started (see
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/epns/survey.aspx),
and although the DEEP gazetteer includes many landscape features within each parish entry, the only geographical coordinates are for parishes. The count of “place-name forms” of course reflects the very large number of variant names in the system. Some of
the earliest EPNS County surveys cover only parish names.
— The Ordnance Survey have made their Open Names gazetteer freely available, and initially it sounds very promising: “2.5 million accurate locations”. However, read a little further and you find "870,000 named and numbered roads, nearly 44,000 settlements
and over 1.6 million postcodes” — which does not leave much room for farms or woods. The OS’ core MasterMap system does list farms and woods, but it is anything but freely available.
WHAT WE ARE NOT ANNOUNCING TODAY
The GB1900 system is not an online gazetteer, but rather a machine for building a gazetteer (it does include a simple gazetteer of settlements, but that is off-the-shelf and there just to help you find the right part of the map to work on).
Our aim is to build an online place name search facility accessing the final GB1900 gazetteer, probably as an additional facility within our web site A Vision of Britain through Time, but that is not currently funded and we cannot announce anything now.
However, the GB1900 system is programmed to dump out its current place name database every 24 hours, and once it starts to build up we can make this dump available for download without funding. It will be under the simplest form of the Creative Commons
license, which means anybody can use it for anything, even commercial, and you won’t need specialised software to work with it.
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However, for now this is getting a bit ahead of ourselves, For this project to work, we need volunteers willing to contribute their eyeballs and fingers to the transcription process. The Cymru1900 system has been closed down but the home page is still
there, to re-direct people to GB1900. That page includes an acknowledgment to all their transcribers and lists their top 10 contributors — so we are looking for more people like them, interested in working on parts of Scotland and England.
Happy transcribing.
With regards
Paula