Research

UK Data Archive launches major historical population resource

A major new resource which makes freely available for the first time all British census reports from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was launched in London this month.

Online Historical Populations Reports, Histpop, gives an extraordinary picture of Britain’s changing population from 1800 up to World War II, making available almost 200,000 pages of digitised reports and data.

The data has been made available thanks to work carried out by AHDS History in the UK Data Archive (UKDA) funded by the JISC digitisation programme.

The new resource pulls together a wealth of information related to population figures in the British Isles, making it easily available to the general public, as well as to demographic and local historians. Researchers will be able to study data relating to the gender and age of the UK’s population, and how it varied from parish to parish, county to county and year to year throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They will also be able to study fluctuations in employment and migration patterns, in the number of inhabited and uninhabited houses, in the number of children born, in the depopulation or development of different areas of the country and how healthy places were to live in.

As well as providing an accurate picture of a period of immense change and upheaval, the resource also contains vivid examples of the stereotypes and prejudices then held among the population, including class distinctions.

In addition Histpop contains Registrar-General reports of the period, 5,000 pages of documents relating to the administration of the census, specially commissioned essays giving the context of included materials and the complete texts of relevant legislation. Access to the collection includes browse and search facilities both of which can be refined by date and/or region.
Histpop is available online at www.histpop.org. For further information about the project contact Matthew Wollard, telephone 01206 873704.

Emotion sensing can help e-learners

Chinese researcher Liping Shen has returned to Shanghai after spending Christmas in the University’s high-tech apartment, the iDorm2.

Liping has completed the first stage of her research collaboration with Essex, using emotion-sensing technology to improve e-learning programmes.

During her four-month stay as the iDorm2’s first resident, Liping tested Essex’s emotion jacket, or X-vest, to establish links between her learning ability and her emotional state.

The system uses a finger clip to measure physical signs of emotion such as heart rate, blood volume pressure and skin resistance.

Liping and her family in the iDorm2

Liping now plans to extend testing on Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s e-Learning platform, which delivers fully interactive lectures to computers, TV screens and mobile phones for more than 15,000 part-time learners in its Network Education College.
She explained that the system could provide feedback to tutors on when students were losing interest, or becoming stressed, during a lecture, allowing them to adjust their teaching in real time.

‘In a traditional classroom, teachers are able to recognise the emotional status of their students and respond in ways that positively impact on learning,’ she said.

‘With remote learners emotion information is missing. Our system would be able to collect emotional information to develop students’ profiles, in order to provide personalised learning services and to give emotional feedback to teachers. This extends some of the benefits of being taught in a real classroom to remote learners.’

Liping’s stay at Essex was supported by BT, which is working with the University to test a range of its home technology in the iDorm2.

For Christmas, Liping’s husband and two-year-old son Zhe flew over to join her in the apartment, which is based in the Computing and Electronic Systems building.

Migraine study

As well as informing staff, students and those outside the University, about activities and events at Essex, Wyvern is also inspiring research!

Two years ago, Professor Chris Cooper read about work using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brain by Psychology’s Professor Arnold Wilkins in the University magazine. Professor Wilkins’ work was during a visit to a lab in the USA but Professor Cooper realised that the new optical devices being used in his own Department, Biological Sciences, were able to perform similar studies by merely shining light on the head. Since then, he and Professor Wilkins have collaborated and were recently awarded a grant by the Wellcome Trust, to continue research with collaborators in medical physics at UCL.

Professor Wilkins explained: ‘We propose an inter-university multidisciplinary study combining expertise in optical measurements of brain function and visual abnormalities in migraines. Changes in oxygen and blood supply occur when brain cells are active. These changes are abnormal in migraines, a disorder that affects 15 per cent of the population. This abnormality has been revealed in the region of the brain responsible for processing visual information so we will use a safe and painless optical technique to measure the supply of oxygen to this region of the brain.’

Professor Wilkins continued: ‘The first study will compare the response to visual stimuli in 20 migraineurs and 20 controls. Many migraineurs report greater visual comfort and reduced headaches when wearing lenses tinted a particular colour. The second study will compare changes in brain oxygenation and blood volume during visual stimulation measured with and without the chosen colour. Unlike MRI, optical techniques for studying the brain are cheap and readily portable. Our long term aim is to investigate the use of the optical technique to monitor large numbers of patients who suffer from migraine and explain why tints reduce headaches.’

This Wellcome Trust project will make use of the Near Infrared Spectroscopy machine found in the University’s Department of Psychology. For more information on this research, please visit the Medical Optics Group website at: www.essex.ac.uk/bs/mog/.

Also in the printed January edition of Wyvern:

• Health study of TETRA masts
• Bookshelf
• Research helps BT plan network investment