Welcome to the Forum

Darren Grant's picture
Submitted by Darren Grant on Fri, 13/05/2011 - 2:19am

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A warm welcome to our new forum, this is an open forum, please feel free to discuss anything relating to Domesday. Technical and non technical discussion welcome.

Doug Brett

Fri, 13/05/2011 - 11:12am

Very pleased to see the project finally out in the open - after 25 years. I remember all the excitement at the time, I had been playing with the emerging technology for a few years by that time so quickly became the local help line for schools and WI groups. I got involved and spent many a busy/happy hour formatting and writing discs buoyed along by the thought that these tiny machines, until now not much more than curios, were coming out and showing what they could do. Brave new world! It was magical. National TV added to the excitement, showing the wider public what to expect… Then it just vanished, leaving us all a tad confused.
More excitement when it was announced that it was, at last, published on the Beeb's website and soon to be handed over to the National Archive. Couldn't wait to see it. Oh joy - it's very good. My fears at the time were that it was going to be a mass of school children's recollections of what they had had for breakfast. But the editors had done a good job and it is all very nicely balanced (even with the omission of village halls).
What next though? We are being invited to re-supply images and to update the text. It's going to be a much narrower, and necessarily skewed, slice of the population involved this time isn't it? It should be a national effort as before, can't have cost that much as we were all volunteers, so why not start from scratch again?
I wonder too what happened to all the discarded material. Some of it still resides on a boxful of 5.25" floppies in my attic. Alongside a box of five BBC Micros, two of which still work. I now feel the urge to attempt to marry up the Beeb's econet with my ethernet here and see if I can salvage the original text. Anybody else tried this? Any advice?

barryhunter's picture

barryhunter

Mon, 16/05/2011 - 10:48pm

I would humbly suggest, that http://www.geograph.org.uk/ is a modern equivalent.

We are collecting photos by the grid square (1x1km), rather than d-blocks, but still in many ways similar.

Darren Grant's picture

Darren Grant

Mon, 16/05/2011 - 11:08pm

I would agree that there are a lot of new sites that offer better modern equivalents to many of the ideas in the domesday project. Google Maps and Street view for example offer the mapping, ariel photography, and virtual walkthroughs found on the domesday discs. Geograph is very similar to the community photos on domesday but domesday reloaded gives us a unique opportunity to look back at the 80's.

What I would be keen to see is more data rich sites adopting Resource Description Framework http://www.w3.org/RDF/ so that it will become easier to combine data from various sources, for example combining population data from the office of National Statistics with maps and photos and historic data from the 1986 domesday project and even the 1086 domesday book. The problem with the internet today is that finding these resources is difficult as you need to know where to look.

barryhunter's picture

barryhunter

Mon, 16/05/2011 - 11:46pm

Geograph does have some support for RDF
eg http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2408521.rdf
And has produced various bulk data dumps.

although I admit dont really understand the concept :(, so there is probably more we could do

PaulWheatley

Wed, 18/05/2011 - 3:49pm

As seen as this seems to be the "musings" thread, here are my thoughts on Domesday Reloaded, with a particular focus on preservation issues. I touch on the open data approach a little:
http://openplanetsfoundation.org/blogs/2011-05-12-bbc-domesday-reloaded-needs-emulation-finish-job

Doug Brett

Wed, 25/05/2011 - 10:23am

With reference to Geograph, yes it has a fine photographic record of the UK but it seems to stop there. It is the words of Domesday that are so fascinating, contemporary writings, inconsequential snippets that summon up the flavour of the time, that's what made it so good. Having said that, Domesday Reloaded isn't providing the stats we were hoping to see in the original.