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. Created and edited geodata using QGIS. Used Excel, Access, and OpenRefine for checking and cleaning data. Added I-CeM occupation codes. 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
- Editor at Wikidata. I have curated data about historians whose work is relevant to the British Civil Wars, 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.
- Sandall’s History of 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment: A Digital Edition. I produced this digital edition of an out of copyright regimental history from the First World War. This included checking copyright status, scanning pages, uploading page scans to the Internet Archive, capturing text with OCR software, checking and editing the text, marking up with TEI XML, record linkage, and using XSL to transform to HTML.
- Contributor to GB1900. Transcribed text from early 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.
Education
- PhD in History, Reading University, 2001. Thesis based on 17th-century financial records. Also included a course in 14th- and 15th-century English palaeography in the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies.
- MA in History, Leeds University, 1996.
- BA first class honours in History, Reading University, 1995.
Publications
My academic publications are not listed here because they are not representative of my professional skills and experience. Most of my publications are now quite old and no longer reflect my interests or opinions. I am not looking for a Research Associate job that involves publishing as I am better suited to being a Research Assistant.