Home » Data

Digitising Historical Telephone Directories with BT Archives

Digitising Historical Telephone Directories with BT Archives:
GISRUK Best Short Paper Award 2021

CDRC collaborative PhD student, Nikki Tanu, and Senior Research Fellow, Dr. Maurizio Gibin, were awarded the ‘Best Short Paper’ award at the 2021 GIS Research UK (GISRUK) online conference on 16 April 2021. Their paper, ‘Georeferencing historical telephone directories to understand innovation diffusion and social change’, described pioneering work in the digital capture and georeferencing of the 1881 telephone directory. The work demonstrates proof of concept that will be rolled out to digitise selected directories up to the 1980s and will make it possible to chart the spatial and social diffusion and use of fixed line telephony in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Process of optical character recognition and geocoding used on the telephone directories

CDRC researcher Meixu (May) Chen was joint winner of the Sinesio Alves Junior Prize (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/casa/remembering-sinesio-alves-junior) for work undertaken whilst she was working at CDRC in Liverpool.

Congratulations to May, Maurizio and Nikki!

(Written by Dr Nick Bearman, Project Delivery Manager, and originally posted on www.data.cdrc.ac.uk)