Connecting historical and contemporary small-area geography in Britain: The creation of digital boundary data for 1971 and 1981 census

This paper reports on the outcome from a project that has developed a GISbased procedure to capture digital boundaries for the small spatial units used in the British Population Census in 1981, and for the geographically comparable units connecting back with the previous enumeration in 1971. 1981 census geography was originally recorded as linear and textual annotations on paper base maps that were subsequently microfilmed. Four methods involving varying degrees of automation for capturing digital representations of these census units from the scanned microfilm imagery are evaluated. Details presented are in the context of British census geography before digital capture of small census units became routine, but the evaluation of the methods and the final procedure cover issues that are generally applicable in situations where the capture of historical mapping is attempted.

[1]  Philip Rees,et al.  Can Census Offices Publish Statistics for More than One Small Area Geography? An Analysis of the differencing Problem in Statistical Disclosure , 1998, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[2]  David J. Martin,et al.  Optimizing Census Geography: The Separation of Collection and Output Geographies , 1998, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[3]  David A. Duce,et al.  Scalable Vector Graphics SVG 1.0 Specification , 2000 .

[4]  M. Langford,et al.  Generating and mapping population density surfaces within a geographical information system. , 1994, The Cartographic journal.

[5]  Denham Cj,et al.  The 1981 Census and its results. , 1983 .

[6]  Ian N. Gregory,et al.  Putting the past in its place: the Great Britain Historical GIS , 1998 .

[7]  David J. Martin,et al.  Towards the Geographies of the 2001 UK Census of Population , 2000 .

[8]  C. Morphet,et al.  The Mapping of Small-Area Census Data—A Consideration of the Role of Enumeration District Boundaries , 1993, Environment & planning A.

[9]  Danny Dorling.  A New Social Atlas of Britain , 1995 .

[10]  A M Kirby,et al.  Some Problems of Mapping the 1971 Census by Computer , 1976 .

[11]  Danny Dorling,et al.  Map design for census mapping , 1993 .

[12]  D. Martin.  2001 Census output areas: from concept to prototype. , 1998, Population trends.

[13]  D. Dorling.  Visualising the geography of the population with the 1991 census. , 1994 .

[14]  ROBERT BARR.  A comparison of aspects of the US and UK censuses of population , 1996, Trans. GIS.