%O © 2019 by the Authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
%T Geo-Referencing and Mapping 1901 Census Addresses for England and Wales
%L discovery10079594
%I MDPI AG
%D 2019
%J ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
%N 8
%K historical censuses; geocoding; address matching; historical geo-demographics; spatial humanities
%A T Lan
%A P Longley
%V 8
%X Geocoding historical addresses is a primary yet nontrivial application of spatial analysis in historical geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial humanities. We demonstrate our endeavours of geo-referencing and visualising historical census addresses in England and Wales, by matching the residential addresses to a historical gazetteer and a contemporary address database of Britain. The results indicate that it is feasible to standardise and geocode a large share of unique addresses from the historical database. The historical gazetteer and the modern address registers are two complementary data assets that can be used to geo-reference both well-formatted addresses in urban areas and non-standard addresses such as place names or building names in rural areas. The geo-referenced historical census data open up new opportunities for a broad spectrum of geo-demographic research on historical population characteristics at the micro level in England and Wales.