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Ian Gregory

Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities

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BA: Geography (Lancaster); MSc: Geographical Information Systems (Edinburgh); PhD: Historical GIS (London)

Digital Humanities
c/o Department of History
Lancaster University
Lancaster, LA1 4YG, UK

Room: B58, Furness
Tel: +44 (0)1524 594967
Fax: +44 (0)1524 846102
E-mail: I.Gregory@lancaster.ac.uk

I am a geographer by training who, after doing an MSc in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) at the University of Edinburgh, got a one-year contract at Queen Mary, University of London working to create a GIS of some nineteenth century administrative data. Somehow this evolved into the Great Britain Historical GIS (GBHGIS), a major database that comprises the majority of statistical data from sources such as the census and vital registration data for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This took several years to build and over £500,000 of funding, primarily from the ESRC. It was also the subject of my PhD. Since leaving London I worked at the University of Portsmouth and then as the Associate Director of Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at the Queens University, Belfast. In September 2006 I moved to Lancaster to lead a new initiative in Digital Humanities. I am on the editorial boards of the journals Social Science History and Historical Methods. I am serving my second term as co-chair of the Social Science History Associations's Historical Geography network as well as my first term on their Executive Committee. Finally, I am on the Institutional Board and Technical Steering Committee of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative.

Research interests :

1. The use of GIS technology to study long-term change in the societies of Britain and Ireland in particular through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

2. Developing an understanding of what GIS has to offer to historical research more generally and developing Historical GIS as an established field within history.

3. Using computing technology across the humanities and social sciences to gain a better understanding of the past.

What is Digital Humanities?

Digital Humanities (also known as Humanities Computing or Computing in the Humanities), is a broad and rapidly growing inter-disciplinary field. It is concerned with using computational techniques to do the following:

  1. Create databases concerned with documents or artefacts relevant to the humanities. This involves capturing, structuring, documenting, preserving and disseminating such data.
  2. Develop generic methodologies to provide new insights into these datasets.
  3. Conduct new scholarship on these databases to increase our understanding of disciplines across the humanities. This is the most important of the three but also perhaps the most neglected as it required inter-disciplinary collaboration between experts in technologies and methodologies on the one hand, and academics with specific research questions that they want to use computational techniques to help answer.
The artefacts and documents studied within Digital Humanities are often text-based but may be a wide range of other sources including: photographs; images of physical artefacts from buildings to ceramics; representations of events or performances; maps; virtual worlds; statistics on human activities from the past; and so on. Increasingly Digital Humanities is concerned with resources that are born-digital.

What is Historical GIS?

For an answer to this see the Historical GIS Research Network website that I maintain.

Recent publications (since 2000):

Books:

Journal articles:

Book chapters:

Other publications:

Current and recently completed grants:

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