Tanu, Nikki;
(2024)
Digitising Historical Telephone Directories to Understand Innovation Diffusion and Historical Social Change in Britain, 1880-1951.
Masters thesis (M.Phil), UCL (University College London).
Preview |
Text
Tanu_10198540_Thesis_Sig removed.pdf Download (6MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Recent years have ushered in a trend of the increasing use of quantitative methods to study research questions across social science disciplines. However, their applicability has remained largely confined to most contemporary datasets, while excluding more dated data sources that were originally produced as hardcopies and, in many instances, not well preserved. This thesis thus presents an inquiry into whether newer quantitative methods could feasibly be applied on a large historical source of population data: the archives of telephone directories held by British Telecommunications. It details the development of a robust pipeline that transforms the raw data of image scans into structured tables of information, a format more amenable to newer techniques of quantitative analyses, alongside a documentation of quality control checks implemented and a discussion of key assumptions made. This is done with the help of various open-source software and accompanied by the creation of teldiR, a package of functions that would aid end-users of the dataset to both extend the work of and make improvements to data capture that has been completed. This thesis then explores some potential applications of this digitally encoded dataset for re-examining historical social science questions. Through quantification of subscription volumes in major settlements, comparisons of telephone adoption patterns can be made across space and time in urban Britain. Linking these data to information from the Censuses helps to further differentiate telephone subscription profiles in different settlements and augments an understanding of the provenance of the telephone subscription dataset as a source of population data. On the whole, the digitised dataset is able to provide coverage, albeit incomplete, of the historical population in Britain in a period where its granularity in combination with its breadth of coverage is unparalleled.
| Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | M.Phil |
| Title: | Digitising Historical Telephone Directories to Understand Innovation Diffusion and Historical Social Change in Britain, 1880-1951 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198540 |
Loading...
Loading...Loading...Loading...Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
