[open-history] Domesday Book online

[Anna Powell-Smith]

On 13 May 2011 13:49, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> [cc'ing open-humanities in case people interested!]
>
> On 13 May 2011 12:35, Jo Walsh <jo.walsh at ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>> On 13/05/2011 12:13, Anna Powell-Smith wrote:
>>> This may be of interest to some people on this list - the first copy
>>> of Domesday Book online: http://www.domesdaymap.co.uk
>>>
>>> I'd like to make this dataset more freely available, both as an API
>>> and raw data.
>>
>> I would love to see the data.
>
> Ditto here!

cool, I've registered it on CKAN: http://ckan.net/package/domesday-book

The original AHRC dataset is at
http://www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=5694 and the
terms say: "Available to all users based in HE/FE institutions, for
not-for-profit educational and research purposes only". I'm not sure
what this equates to in CKAN terms, so I've left it as 'licence
unknown' for now.

The AHRC dataset also includes an English translation, but this is
copyright the original publishers, Phillimore.

At some point I'll write a README for the AHRC dataset. Happy to talk
to anyone about it.

>> We have here at EDINA a dataset covering historic placenames from Domesday
>> Book era up to modern day - only for Cheshire so far - created by text
>> mining the English Place Name Survey.
>>
>> So for Domesday's Bosley:
>> http://www.domesdaymap.co.uk/place/SJ9165/bosley/
>>
>> We have this sort of metadata (where the abbreviations are documents)
>> Boselega        DB      1086
[snip]

Cool! Looks like a fascinating project.

Is the widget of the kind that can be called via an API?

>> And does your AHRC data actually have the DB-era names or only the modern
>> equivalents?

The AHRC data only has the modern equivalents I'm afraid. The National
Archives site has the DB-era names, and I found a chap who's scraped
it: http://keithbriggs.info/DB_place-name_forms.html

The AHRC data might still be useful to you though: each place-name is:

1. geocoded
2. linked to the name of its hundred & county
3. given a code to specify whether it (a) has a modern name equivalent
(b) is no longer a named place but can still be identified on the
ground, or (c) is totally lost.

>>> The underlying data comes from a 1980s dataset that was funded by the
>>> AHRC - I probably need someone with more knowledge of licences than me
>>> to look at whether it can be added to CKAN!
>
> @Anna:  CKAN isn't restricted to fully-open datasets (there are lots
> of datasets where license isn't yet clear, where data may be one day
> open etc) so please go ahead and register it.
>
>> I imagine in this case the university/ies that did the digitisation /
>> transcription will maintain that it holds copyright, and one will have to
>> make the case to open license there. Which in theory shouldn't be hard if
>> the university has no plans to make commercial use of the data - what
>> frustrates me is institutions sitting on copyright by default, despite the
>> lack of such plans...

Yes, that seems to be the licence under which it was released.