IMAG - What's new

What's New

Life courses in context
The International Institute of Social History (IISH) announces a new website: Life courses in context, a collaboratory based on Dutch population registers and censuses (19th and 20th century) :
"The programme's objective is to develop a database with about 40.000 individual life courses of people born in the period of 1863-1922. This database with micro-data will be supplemented with core data on the level of the municipalities. This will be done by digitalizing the results of the ten-yearly censuses as they were taken between 1859 and 1947."
Please visit this website at: http://www.lifecoursesincontext.nl/

IMAG Workshop: Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Historical Data: Intersections and Opportunities, November 10-11, 2003
The International Microdata Access Group invites submissions of paper proporsals for a two-day IMAG workshop to be hosted by the Centre Interuniversitaire d'études démographiques, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada, November 10-11, 2003, on the theme "Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Historical Data: Intersections and Opportunities." Interested participants are requested to e-mail a one-page proposal, plus their name, academic affiliation, mailing address, telephone and e-mail address to Evan Roberts, eroberts@hist.umn.edu by March 15, 2003.

Lisa Dillon has been awarded a Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant for new researchers to create the Historical Demography Research Infrastructure. This four-year grant will establish at the Université de Montréal a physical and virtual facility dedicated to the development and dissemination of historical population data. Dillon has also been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant for the project "Canadian Households Across Time and Space: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses of Complex Family Patterns in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada." This project will involve integrating the 1881 Canadian Census data with similar data from 1871 and 1901, as well as linking individuals from the 1871 microdata sample to the 100% 1881 census database.

From the programme for large investments from NWO (Dutch National Fund for Scientific Research) the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) in collaboration with the NIWI has been awarded a grant of over three million EURO for the programme ‘Life courses in context’.The programme’s objective is to develop a database with about 40.000 individual life courses of people born in the period of 1863-1922. This database with micro-data will be supplemented with core data on the level of the municipalities. This will be done by digitalizing the results of the ten-yearly censuses as they were taken between 1859 and 1947. Above this amount the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts has granted 600.000 EURO. The programme will take five years and will start at the 1st of October. For more details, see http://www.iisg.nl/~hsn/index.html

Kees Mandemakers and Lisa Dillon have written a protocol, ‘Best practices with large databases on historical populations,' originally presented at the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) Workshop, "Large Databases: Results and Best Practices," The International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 17-18 May 2001. ******To view this document, please click HERE.

Researchers at the University of Guelph are developing an important new research tool: a digitised sample of the 1891 Census of Canada for Ontario. The 5% sample will be used by historians, economists, sociologists, and others interested in the social and economic fabric of late-Victorian Canada. The digitised sample will create a resource for the interrogation of Canadian social and economic history which complements the range of historical census projects at other Canadian universities. For more details, please visit their website at: http://www.uoguelph.ca/history/census/index.htm

UK Update: The complete cleaned database of the 1881 Census of England and Wales has been deposited at the UK Data Archive, and also delivered to Minneapolis as part of the NAPP project. The publically-funded 1901 Census Project has run into severe difficulties. Demand for the service was so high on the opening day that within hours the service was taken off-line. From that time until the present (July 6th) the service has not been functioning. It is unclear whether this is simply because of demand or for other reasons. The knock-on effect for Essex is that windows of opportunity for gaining funding for enhancement of this census have slipped. For the public message see: http://www.censushelpdesk.co.uk/ and http://www.pro.gov.uk/about/access/statement.htm.

A team of Canadian researchers from seven universities across Canada have recently secured $5.2 million from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to support the Canada Century Research Infrastructure, a series of Canadian census micro databases from 1911 to 1951. Click here to view a webcast in which principal investigator Chad Gaffield (University of Ottawa) discusses this important initiative.

Researchers from five countries affiliated with IMAG--the Minnesota Historical Census Projects, the Dept. of History, University of Essex, the Canadian Families Project, University of Victoria, the Institute of Canadian Studies, University of Ottawa, the Norwegian Historical Data Center (Tromso) and the Digital Archive of the Norwegian National Censuses (Bergen)--have launched the North Atlantic Population Project, a project to integrate nineteenth-century census databases, including 100% samples of the 1880/1 censuses of England, Wales & Scotland, the United States and Canada created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Click here for further information about this project.

Our publication, the Handbook of International Historical Microdata for Population Research, has won the American Association of History and Computing 2001 Book Award for Individual and Group Contributions Promoting History and Computing. The AAHC Book Prize was announced during the annual meeting of the AAHC, February 1-3, 2001, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Updated June 23, 2004.