Course: Working Digitally with Historical Maps and Geographical Information -- Portsmouth, June 2012

The Great Britain Historical GIS Team and the University of Portsmouth are running a one-week hands-on introduction to historical GIS methods on June 18th-22nd, 2012.

It is aimed at anyone wanting to create a digital resource from sources which are both historical and geographical – most obviously old maps, but also historical census information or geographically rich text. You may be planning on building a “historical GIS” or simply a web site with many maps – one aim is to help you decide the most appropriate final result for your particular sources and goals:

• We will equip you to do a small project in historical GIS or map-based digitization; or to plan and manage a larger project – so we include both hands-on training with GIS software, and sessions on source selection, project planning, copyright and budgeting.
• Hands-on training emphasizes Quantum GIS, a capable free open-source alternative to the commercial GIS software that historians and ‘memory institutions’ cannot afford, but most skills will be transferable to other programs.
• Quantum excels in accessing standards-based on-line GIS services, such as web map servers providing base maps. We will show you how to avoid starting from scratch, by accessing new online services and download facilities within the GB Historical GIS.
• Members of the GB Historical GIS team will teach core modules, but the course also features case studies presented by other members of Portsmouth Geography, and speakers from the Ordnance Survey, British Library and the National Archives.
• Hands-on sessions will have a maximum of ten attendees per leader.
• Our campus adjoins Portsmouth’s historic dockyard, home of the Royal Navy for five hundred years. The course includes a visit to the Admiralty Map Library, one of the world’s great historical map libraries but open to visitors only by special arrangement, and a dinner at the Royal Naval Club.
• Portsmouth is an hour and a half from London by train, and easily reached from London Heathrow, London Gatwick and Southampton airports. Car parking can be arranged.

Portsmouth Geography is the base for the Great Britain Historical GIS project and several other major online resources. Uniquely, we have not just twenty years experience in historical GIS, but over ten years of experience in employing Geographical Information Systems technology in standards-based digitization projects, with funding from the UK National Lottery, the Joint Information Systems Committee and the European Union.

Course fee: £849, including lunches, refreshments and the Working Digitally dinner. Overnight accommodation for four to six nights is available for £37.50 per night (bed and breakfast). For more details and to register, visit:

             http://www.port.ac.uk/workingdigitally