Manchester meetings and crowdsourcing data

Do you want to share in my project to map historical meetings in Manchester?

Here is the link to my draft database of public meetings in Manchester, 1775-1848. It's using google fusion tables.
You can map the points by clicking on 'visualise' and 'map'.



I'm thinking about crowd-sourcing it to get more data. I'll set up a separate page to explain the purposes of the database soon, but in the meantime, do add your own data from historical newspapers, Home Office papers, archives, etc. And let me know!

My aim is to show how the type and locations of public meetings in Manchester changed over time. So, for example, radical meetings used St. Peter's Fields from 1816; trades used St. George's Fields from 1808; the loci of meetings moved southwards as Manchester developed between Oxford Road and Chorlton.

The points are plotted on the map (using lat and long grid references and each category of public meeting has its own symbol. So loyal meetings are dark blue, religious meetings are a person at prayer, etc.

The categories are very broad and not meant to be definitive. 'Reform' meetings refer to liberal middle class reform meetings (e.g. during 1830-2), whereas 'radical' can refer to any meeting calling for universal suffrage or other more radical demands. 'Loyal' meetings are Church and King or anti-Jacobin meetings in the 1790s, and specifically anti-reform meetings in the early 19thC. ALCLA= Anti Corn Law League/Association; NPL = anti-New Poor Law.

I'm having trouble locating some of the public houses (directories only specify the street, and pub names aren't shown on maps until the first edition OS of 1846-9).

The only other problem is that I can't export the KML/KMZ file to google earth (and thus onto my historical map layers) without it losing the formatting for the different symbols. There's no way of doing this at present, so I have to rely on the old way of putting the symbols myself on google maps, then exporting it from there.

If you'd like to contribute, or know of any local history groups in Manchester who might want to get involved, let me know: k.navickas@herts.ac.uk




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