Education
- 'Introducing Mapping, Spatial Data and GIS' (10 CATS points, FHEQ level 4), Department for Continuing Education, Oxford University, 2025 (view certificate). Included theoretical reading and practical work with QGIS.
- PhD in History, Reading University, 2001. Thesis about military administration and supply in the 17th century, based on detailed research in TNA series SP 28. Also covered history of businesses, some owned and run by women, in London. Included a course in 14th- and 15th-century English palaeography in the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies.
- MA in Military History, Leeds University, 1996.
- BA first class honours in History, Reading University, 1995.
Work experience
- 2023–2024: Research Assistant (Grade 6), 'The entrepreneurs who made Glasgow: the city and its businesses 1861-1901' (University of Strathclyde). Interpreted historical maps and Post Office directories, and created and edited geodata using QGIS. This was particularly focused on reconstructing streets and house number sequences. Also used Excel, Access, and OpenRefine for checking and cleaning data. Added I-CeM occupation codes to data about businesses. Wrote custom Python scripts for checking data. Wrote documentation for data and working methods. Attended Zoom meetings. Received further training in QGIS, cyber security, health and safety, equal opportunities and diversity, and complaint handling.
- 2008–present: transcription contractor as sole trader and as director of Different Hand Ltd. Some clients' identities are confidential but those who can be named include:
- 'The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England' (Birkbeck University of London and University College London): transcription and basic XML markup of 2,200 pages of petitions (c. 600,000 words). The petitions that I transcribed for this project have been published at British History Online.
- Corpus Synodalium: a database of medieval church statutes compiled by Professor Rowan Dorin. I contributed transcripts of printed Latin texts that were too difficult for OCR (c. 991,000 words).
- The Wandering Grocer: the journals of William Whitehead, a grocer from West Hartlepool, who travelled around the world in 1898. I proofread, corrected, and indexed an existing transcript.
- Cambridge Population Group:
- 'Life in the Suburbs'. Entered burial registers from St Botolph Aldgate into Access database, checked and corrected work done by others, calendared tax records and indemnity bonds into Excel spreadsheets. The parish register database that I contributed to has been published at SAS-Space, and part has been republished at London Lives.
- 'The Origins of the Modern Demographic Regime: Infant Mortality by Social Status in Georgian London'. Entered parish registers from St Martin in the Fields into Access database.
- Pilot for 'Mortality and Epidemiological Change in Manchester, 1750-1850'. Entered burial registers from Manchester Cathedral into Access database.
- History of Parliament:
- '1624 Parliament'. Transcribed the diary of Richard Dyott MP after enhancing the page images to compensate for water damage. Transcript was published at British History Online.
- 'House of Lords'. Visited The National Archives at Kew to check microfilm of 17th-century probate administrations against Excel spreadsheet.
- 2016–2017: casual data inputter, 'Drivers of entrepreneurship and small business' (Cambridge Population Group). Checked 19th-century census data against document images and linked records between census datasets.
Volunteering and personal projects
- TEI editing. I am producing digital editions of out-of-copyright texts, marked up with Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML. This has involved checking copyright status, scanning pages, uploading page scans to the Internet Archive, capturing printed text with OCR software, manually transcribing manuscript text, checking and editing the text, marking up with TEI XML, record linkage, and using XSL to transform to HTML.
- Available now: Sandall’s History of 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment, a published First World War battalion history. Includes new indexes of people and places, linked to external identifiers.
- In progress: manuscript letters written by Nehemiah Wharton, a soldier in the English Civil War.
- Editor at Wikidata. I curated data about historians, importing several hundred new items using OpenRefine and improving hundreds of existing items. This work was particularly focused on linking Wikidata items to external identifiers and disambiguating authors.
- Contributor to GB1900. Transcribed text from Ordnance Survey maps.
- Beta tester for From the Page collaborative transcription software, developed by Ben Brumfield. This was one of the first online platforms for crowdsourced manuscript transcription and indexing.
Publications
My old academic publications are not listed here as they do not reflect my interests, opinions, or profesional experience. I am not intending to publish any new secondary works because I want to concentrate on my professional work as a research assistant and manuscript transcriber.
As a client or employer you will benefit from my experience, but you can be assured that I will not publish anything that disagrees with your methods or conclusions, I will keep all material confidential, and I will not have any higher priorities than my paid work.
Some datasets, transcripts, and notes from my old research on the British Civil Wars are freely available at Github.