| Summary: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, June 2007. e-Science technologies have the potential to enable large-scale datasets to be searched analysed, and shared quickly, efficiently, and in complex and novel ways. So far, little application has been made of the processing power of grid technologies to humanities data, due to lack of available large scale datasets which would warrant such high performance computing, and little understanding of or access to e-Science technologies. The ReACH workshop series, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, was established in June 2006 at University College London to investigate the potential application of e-Science and high performance computing technologies to a large dataset of interest to historians, humanists, digital consumers, and the general public: historical census records. The ReACH series consisted of various workshops undertaken over the summer of 2006 to investigate the academic, technical, and managerial aspects that would have to be taken into account in order to set up a large scale project which would utilise UCL’s high performance computing facilities to analyse large scale historical census datasets from the UK’s National Archives, in conjunction with the genealogy firm, Ancestry. By undertaking a scoping study in this manner, it was hoped to determine the academic merits of such a proposal: it may be feasible to undertake this analysis, but would it be useful to historical researchers? What would the analysis do? What would the technical implementation of such a project involve? What staffing and funding costs would be required? The workshop series featured input from various project partners, and interdisciplinary experts, to ascertain whether a full scale project would be worthwhile to undertake. Moreover, the workshop series aimed to ascertain if and how e-Science (defined as “a specific set of advanced technologies for Internet resource-sharing and collaboration: so-called grid technologies, and technologies integrated with them, for instance for authentication, data-mining and visualization. (AHRC ICT 2006)”) can be applied to the arts and humanities. Public interest in historical census data is phenomenal, as the overwhelming response to mounting the 1901 census online at The National Archives demonstrates (Inman, 2002). Yet the data is also much used for research by historians (see Higgs 2005 for an introduction). There are many versions of historical census datasets available, covering a variety of aspect of the census, and digitised census records are one of the largest digital datasets available in arts and humanities research. In the Arts and Humanities Data Service repository collection alone there are currently 155 datasets pertaining to historical census data (from the UK and abroad) created for research purposes (AHDS 2006). Commercial firms dealing (or having dealt) in genealogy information (such as Ancestry1http://www.ancestry.com/, Genes Re-united2http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/, QinetiQ 3http://www.qinetiq.com/, British Origins4 http://www.origins.net/BOWelcome.aspx, The Genealogist5http://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/, and 1837Online6http://www.1837online.com/ ) have digitised vast swathes of historical census material (although to varying degrees of completeness and accuracy). There is much interest from the historical community in using this emerging data for research, and developing tools and computational architectures which can aid historians in analysing this complex data (see Crocket, Jones and Schürer (2006) for an advanced proposal regarding the creation of a longitudinal database of English individuals and households from 1851 to 1901, see also the work of the North Atlantic Population Project7http://www.nappdata.org/napp/). However, there have been few opportunities for the application of high performance computing to utilise large scale processing power in the analysis of historical census material, especially analysing data across the spectrum of census years available in the UK (7 different censuses taken at 10 year intervals from 1841-1901). Although certain digitized datasets of the UK census are in the public domain (18818The 1881 Census for England and Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man (Enhanced Version) was deposited in the Arts and Humanities Data Service repository by K. Schürer (University of Essex. Department of History) in 2000, and is available from http://www.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/collection.htm?uri=hist-4177-1) most were digitized by commercial companies and are unavailable to the academic researcher. Most historians do not have access to, or do not know how to use, high performance computing facilities. The aim of the ReACH series was to bring together disparate expertise in Computing Science, Archives, Genealogy, History, and Humanities Computing, to discuss how e-science scale techniques could be applied to be of use in the historical research community. The project partners each brought various expertise and input to the project: * UCL School of Library, Archives and Information Studies9http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/, who have expertise in digital humanities and advanced computational techniques, as well as digital records management, * The National Archives10http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ , who select, preserve and provide access to, and advice on, historical records, e.g. the censuses of England and Wales 1841-1901 (and also the Isle of Man, Channel Islands and Royal Navy censuses) * Ancestry.co.uk11http://www.ancestry.co.uk/, who own a massive dataset of census holdings worldwide, and who have digitized the censuses of England and Wales under license from The National Archives. The input of Ancestry was central to this research to gain access to the complete range of UK census years in digital format. * UCL Research Computing12http://www.ucl.ac.uk/research-computing/, the UK's Centre for Excellence in networked computing, who have extensive high performance computing facilities available for use in research. The project aimed to investigate the reuse of pre-digitised census data: presuming there was not funding available to be in the business of digitisation of other record data for any pilot project. The project also wished to investigate the use of commercial datasets (as many of the large census data sets are owned by commercial firms: in this case, Ancestry), and the licensing and managerial issues this would raise for future projects. The project also wanted to establish how feasible, and indeed useful, undertaking such an analysis of historical census data would be. The results of the well attended workshop series was a sketch for a potential project, and recommendations regarding the implementation of e-science (high performance computing) technologies in this area. However, at this time, it was not thought possible to pursue the potential project at this time in the following e-Science call which emanated from the AHRC in October 2006 due to a variety of reasons which are elucidated in this paper. Reasons for not taking the project forward at this time were not technical or managerial, but historical: it will be a few years before all the digitized data required to make this project a success will be available (or be of high enough quality, see Holmes 2006). Nevertheless, the scoping nature of this project did highlight interesting aspects of the application of high performance computing to humanities data: discussing the nature, size and quality of humanities datasets (as opposed to scientific datasets), and managerial and technical expertise in data management, security, and licensing. Importantly, the nature of working with a commercial company on their sensitive data was also explored from a legal aspect, highlighting issues regarding use and reuse of digital data for the arts and humanities: who “owns” resulting datasets from collaborative projects? This paper describes the methodology of the workshops, reporting on suggestions made during the series regarding potential applications of high performance computing which would benefit academic historians, sketching out a future project regarding how historical census material can be analysed utilising high performance computing, and extrapolates recommendations that can be applied in general to the use of e-Science and high performance computing in the arts and humanities research sectors. Bibliography * Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). Cross Search Catalogue. 2006. Accessed 2006-10-31. http://www.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/search.htm?nq=n&q=census&s=all&coll=y&item=y * Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). AHRC ICT Programme Activities and Services. 2006. Accessed 2006-11-13. http://www.ahrcict.rdg.ac.uk/activities/e-science/background.htm * Crocket, A., C. E. Jones, and K. Schürer. The Victorian Panel Study. Report Submitted to the ESRC (Award Ref: RES-500-25-5001), May 2006. 2006. * Higgs, Edward. Making Sense of the Census Revisited: Census Records for England and Wales 1801-1901: A Handbook for Historical Researchers. London: Institute of Historical Research, 2005. * Holmes, R. The Accuracy and Consistency of the Census Returns for England 1841-1901 and their Indexes. M.A. Dissertation. School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London, 2006. * Inman, Phillip. Genealogy. The Guardian (Thursday September 26, 2002). Accessed 2006-11-03. http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,,798781,00.html
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