Crowd-sourced digital historic parish boundary project

This project uses crowd-sourcing to create a new digital historic parish boundary dataset which will be completely free to use. We have teamed up with T.C.H. Cockin who produced a highly detailed and accurate paper atlas of pre-1844 parish boundaries: The Parish Atlas of England (Barlaston, 2017). Our aim is to turn this into a publicly available Geographical Information System (GIS) boundary dataset and gazetteer for non-commercial use. This will be freely available in a number of different formats from simple to very advanced to suit all types of users, and will come with online guides as to how the different formats can be used to make maps.

We are looking for volunteers!

Volunteers with no prior experience

Volunteers with no prior experience are needed to do georeferencing and adding names:

• Georeferencing – stretching a scan of a map so it sits in its correct geographical location
• Adding names of places from images provided

What is needed:

• Broadband connection and a computer or laptop
• Volunteers will need to download some free mapping software
• Attention to detail

Full training will be given and there will be lots of support.

Volunteers with some GIS/programming experience

Volunteers with some GIS/programming experience are needed to help with a variety of tasks including automating some of the GIS work and mentoring the volunteers.

This volunteering experience will suit people who want to enhance their GIS experience and contribute to valuable resource creation.

How to get involved

E-mail Max Satchell at aems2@cam.ac.uk to find out more about these opportunities!

Much of the work of the project is "georeferencing" the pages of the Cockin Atlas. Georeferencing is the mechanism by which the internal coordinate system of a map image is "stretched" so that it fits a geographic coordinate system. Each page of the Atlas includes a grid which represents the boundaries of the OS first edition 6 inch map sheets from which the boundaries were digitised. We have GIS data of these boundaries which means we can accurately georeference each Atlas page. The image on the left shows the boundaries of the OS map sheets for Yorkshire in the GIS interface. The image on the right shows one of the pages of the Atlas being georeferenced.