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Cultural Atlases and Text based (Re)sources

Paul Ell
Queen's University Belfast

Text-based source material in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is becoming ever more available to scholars in electronic format thanks to advances in communications technology that allow large amounts of data to be transferred to an academic's desk and the development of digitisation technologies that have made it increasingly easy to convert analogue numeric or alpha material into digital formats.

In a number of countries this trend has been recognised by those bodies which fund academic research in terms of developing grant programmes to make available in electronic form key datasets of value to researchers. Funders argue that these programmes will help to promote research and, over time, will reduce research costs by relieving the scholar of the need to spend time gathering data. At the forefront of key resources have been national statistical surveys and other datasets with both chronological depth and spatial spread. These datasets can form, in terms of attribute data, the building blocks of Historical Geographical Information Systems and Cultural Atlases. However, the sources need to be used with some consideration.

This presentation outlines programmes developed in the US, UK, Ireland and elsewhere to create 'strategic' research resources, briefly reviews a range of statistical and text based sources, and discusses the unique problems, rewards and challenges of incorporating such records into geographical information systems and atlases.