AddressingHistory—Crowdsourcing a Nation's Past

Abstract

This paper charts the development and delivery of a Web 2.0 informed community engagement tool and application programming interface (API) developed at EDINA in partnership with the National Library of Scotland, as part of the JISC Digitisation and e-Content Programme. The AddressingHistory Web tool enables members of the community, both within and beyond academia (particularly local history groups and genealogists), to enhance and combine data from digitized historical Scottish Post Office Directories with contemporaneous large-scale historical maps. The paper discusses the background of post office directories and the corresponding georeferenced old maps for Scotland, the technical platforms deployed including sustainable software components, and Web applications and services. It also examines issues relating to data parsing, user generated content (UGC) created by the community including georeferencing, and the use of social media amplification for community engagement and future directions. To conclude, the paper argues that to be successful online, crowdsourcing tools such as the one developed for this project require a critical mass of content to fully engage the user community and that such success will ultimately be measured by continual and extended use within the wider community.

KEYWORDS:

• crowdsourcing
• genealogy
• Scotland
• open source
• historic mapping
• georeferencing
• text parsing
• community engagement

Acknowledgments

Chris Fleet, George Hamilton, Ian Fieldhouse James Reid, Lasma Sietinsone, and Fiona Hemsley-Flint

© 2013 Crown copyright

Notes

Edinburgh Beltane was established as a National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) Beacon for Public Engagement. More information can be found at http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/about/beacons/edinburgh-beltane. The NCCPE Beacons Programme has now come to the end and Edinburgh Beltane has since rebranded to Beltane Public Engagement Network and may be found at http://www.beltanenetwork.org/

For example, Clan MacLea/Livingstone (http://clanlivingstone.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1084&p=9800&hilit=addressinghistory#p9800), Rootschat (http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=496764

Indeed, many of the social media monitoring techniques tried on AddressingHistory are now successfully being used to better monitor social media mentions of other EDINA projects and services.

The partnership cultivated between AddressingHistory and Edinburgh Research & Innovation and Edinburgh Beltane has initiated ongoing communications between EDINA and both organizations with a view to enhancing community engagement from broader service level perspectives.

Note: A free-to-access index for the Glasgow Post Office directories from 1783 to 1911 is now available—http://bizdirs.from-mt.com/ glasgow/

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