Research
North Atlantic Population Project
The Department of History has been awarded a grant more
than $60,000 by the United States, National Science Foundation as part of
a collaborative project headed at the University of Minnesota, with the
Universities of Ottawa, Bergen, Tromso and Umeċ to integrate
machine-readable, late nineteenth-century 100 per cent census samples from
USA, Canada, Great Britain, Norway and Iceland. Some 90 million records
from these censuses will be classified along common systems, and a new set
of constructed variables describing household compositions, family
inter-relationships and urban and metropolitan residence will be created
to form a single database. This four year project will ensure full
comparability of these five major datasets and eventually integrate and
disseminate them through mirrored web sites in each country.
The resulting database will provide a remarkable resource for the study
of international migration, urbanisation, industrialisation and the
fertility transition, and allow for the comparative investigation of a
wide range of topics in social and demographic history.
Professor Kevin Schürer
Professor Kevin Schürer will lead the British component of the
project, and Senior Research Officer, Matthew Woollard, will co-ordinate
the occupational classification from all countries, ensuring that the
approximately 4 million unique occupational strings are coded compatibly.
In an innovative move all coding dictionaries will be created through a
web-based collaboration, which will co-ordinate coding operations.
For further details contact Kevin Schürer, UK Data Archive, e-mail: schurer@essex.ac.uk
Also in the printed October edition of Wyvern:
