Making Historical Sources Accessible: part II

In part I of this series, I discussed how the simple division of a book into separate webpages can help immensely in making the data in it more accessible. The example I used was John Timbs' Club Life of London, which was fairly easy to divide because each Club, Pub or Society formed a separate webpage. Not all books divide up so easily. In this post I would like to discuss producing a 'Good Bits' version and will briefly mention using the Wikipedia as a further tool.

I will use as my example a book published in 1745 entitled London in 1731, written by 'Don Manoel Gonzales' who may or may not have been Daniel Defoe. It contains a lot of information about London at this time, somewhat like a tourist guide, going through the city ward by ward but digressing periodically into topics of interest. The full title of the book is London in 1731. Containing a Description of the City of London; both in regard to its Extent, Buildings, Government, Trade, Etc. and it delivers.

However, it is a dense block of text and, like Timbs' work, is not something you will normally want to read from cover to cover. What we will try to do is make the most interesting parts more available.

The first thing, obviously, is to decide just what these parts are. I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that I would focus on a) information on significant public places for which there is plenty of modern information but for which contemporary accounts are likely to be significant to the historian or historical novelist, and b) information which is otherwise quite difficult to find, particularly for this period.

You can find all the categories over at my website http://www.pascalbonenfant.com/18c/lo... if you want more detail.

Let's look at a 'Type A' example. One interesting snippet is Don Manoel's Account of Christ's Hospital School - a charity school established in the 17th century. It contains information about the rules under which a child could be admitted to the school, how the governing committee worked, what would happen to the children when they finished their education and even what they had for each meal. We extract all this information into a single webpage (http://www.pascalbonenfant.com/18c/lo...) and go across to our old friend Google to see how it works out.

Unlike the Salutation and Cat in the previous post, Christ's Hospital School produces a lot of results. The school has its own extensive website and there are references all over the place but nevertheless our webpage makes it in at number 26. Moreover, it contains information that is not on the School's own website.

Also, on the first page of the search we see that there is a Wikipedia entry for the school. If we go to the Wiki page we will find a section at the bottom of the page entitled External Links. Anyone can edit a Wikipedia page so we click on [edit] and add our link. Over time this will probably move us up the search ranking because our page is now linked to from an important site.

For a 'Type B' example Don Manoel has a lot of information about British Trade. For example, we learn that Britain exported large quantities of bullion, lead and English cloth to India and China and received tea, china ware cabinets, silks, coffee and muslins among others. This is information that is quite hard to track down, even if you knew it existed in the first place. So we extract it into a single page (http://www.pascalbonenfant.com/18c/lo...) as usual.

This sort of information is quite tricky to search for but if we enter "imports and exports georgian period" we find our page at number 1 on the list. Other combinations may not be so successful - it is easy for the search engine to return values for Georgia the country - but at least we have given our researcher a much better chance of finding the information.

What we have done with London in 1731 is not so different from what we did with Club Life in London but it has required a bit more work. Not too much more - the main difference has been deciding which bits are important enough to put in their own page. Once again, we have rescued some historical titbits from obscurity.

In my next post, I intend to discuss the power of formatting. Simply presenting information in different formats can enhance its useability immensely. To be continued.