Building a life course dataset from Australian convict records: Founders and Survivors: Australian life courses in historical content, 1803-1920

Janet Susan McCalman; Leonard Smith; Sandra Silcot; Rebecca Kippen

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-19884-2_14

Building a life course dataset from Australian convict records: Founders and Survivors: Australian life courses in historical content, 1803-1920

Janet Susan McCalman, Leonard Smith, Sandra Silcot, Rebecca Kippen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (Book) › Research › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Founders & Survivors is a multi-university and public collaborative project that is building a transnational and intergenerational dataset of life courses generated from the UNESCO recognised convict records of Tasmania. This chapter outlines the technical history of the project: mass digitization and archiving online of over 100,000 images, manual scholarly transcription and the building of a prosopography database. This comprises a relational genealogy database integrated with an XML (BaseX) source database. Individual life histories are compiled dynamically from diverse sources, linked by a combination of machine matching and human judgment, and managed by an independent link management module. Using Google Docs over 50 online volunteers crowdsourced the convict genealogies and coded the data. Manual linkage and scholarly verification remained essential for the collation of prosopographical data and manual coding was necessary for statistical analysis.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Population Reconstruction
Editors	Gerrit Bloothooft, Kees Mandemakers, Peter Christen, Marijn Schraagen
Place of Publication	Switzerland
Publisher	Springer
Chapter	14
Pages	285-298
Number of pages	14
ISBN (Electronic)	9783319198842
ISBN (Print)	9783319198835
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19884-2_14
Publication status	Published - 2015
Externally published	Yes

Keywords

death certificate
record type
vital registration
conduct record
link management

Access to Document

10.1007/978-3-319-19884-2_14

Cite this

McCalman, J. S., Smith, L., Silcot, S., & Kippen, R. (2015). Building a life course dataset from Australian convict records: Founders and Survivors: Australian life courses in historical content, 1803-1920. In G. Bloothooft, K. Mandemakers, P. Christen, & M. Schraagen (Eds.), Population Reconstruction (pp. 285-298). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19884-2_14

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Building a life course dataset from Australian convict records: Founders and Survivors : Australian life courses in historical content, 1803-1920. / McCalman, Janet Susan; Smith, Leonard; Silcot, Sandra et al.

Population Reconstruction. ed. / Gerrit Bloothooft; Kees Mandemakers; Peter Christen; Marijn Schraagen. Switzerland : Springer, 2015. p. 285-298.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (Book) › Research › peer-review

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