Project: Life and Death in an Urban Setting: The people of Gamla stan and Södermalm 1878-1926


(A) Background, personnel and funding

Q. Name of project

Stockholm som livsmiljö: Befolkningen i Gamla stan och på Södermalm 1878-1926.

Q. Name of project IN ENGLISH

Life and death in an urban setting: The people of Gamla stan and Södermalm 1878-1926.

Q. Principal researcher(s)

Stefan Fogelvik, Lars Nilsson, Eva Bernhard, Bo Burström

Q. Who can/should be contacted now, and how?

Name:

Dr. Stefan Fogelvik

Postal Address:

City Archives of Stockholm, S:t Eriksgatan 121,

S-113 43 STOCKHOLM, Sweden

E-mail Address:

stefan.fogelvik@ssa.stockholm.se

Web site:

http://www.ssa.stockholm.se

Q. When did research begin?

The project with standardisation of professions, cause of death and adding geographic codes and coordinates in a systematic way for all our data started 1999. But we have been adding coordinates on an ad hoc bases since the early 1980s.

Q. Is the project still in existence? If it has ended, when did it end? If it still exists, when is it expected to end?

Yes. We have got funding till the end of 2001. Then we will hopefully have achieved the goals for the project.

Q. What institution(s) was the project based in?

The project is a joint venture between the City Archives of Stockholm and the department of Urban history at the University of Stockholm. All the work is done at the City Archives.

Q. How many people were/are employed, and for how long? Were these people recruited specially for the project, or were they already employed by the institution(s)?

The project currently employs one full-time staff and tree part-time funded by external means. But staff from the City Archives contribute to the work done in the project.

Q. How much did the project cost?

1.500.000 SKR (about 180.000 ECU) for a tree year period is what we have got in extarnal funding. The total cost is hard to estimate with all the work done by staff members in their regular positions.

Q. Who paid for the project?

FRN (Forskningsrådsnämden) The Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research.

Q. If the project is still underway, has all necessary funding to complete the project been raised?

Hopefully yes.

Q. How easy has it been to raise the money?

For this project we got it on our second try. We were lucky to fit a new category of projects which were focused of preparing and editing longitudinal data to make it available to a wide research community.

Q. Other than raising the money, what are the biggest problems your project has faced?

Finding the right qualification for the special tasks involved in the project.

Q. Have there been any pleasant surprises in the course of the project?

We have got a good respond from many different potential users and also got a respond from our politicians who are doing the real financing of our work. We have also with the product we have done so far created a understanding of maps potential as a tool for retrieval, analysis and presentation of data with a spatial reference.

Q. How likely is it that further funding might be raised within your country for a collaborative European project?

I think that chances are good if we can define simple and easy end products from a joint European venture.


(B) Project Goals

Q. What geographical area is covered by the project? What is the MODERN legal status of this area? (i.e. is it a nation state, a province of a nation state, etc). If the area currently lacks a legal definition, when was it defined and by whom?

City of Stockholm, Sweden and the world.

Q. Does the project aim to: (a) Reconstruct boundaries at a single date; (b) Reconstruct boundaries at a series of dates; (c) Construct a continuous record of changing boundaries over a period?

For us it is enough with (b).

Q. What is the earliest date covered by the project?

The earliest date for which we have information for place and date of birth is 1780 so that’s our

Starting date.

Q. What is the latest date covered by the project?

The Roteman Archives which is the prime source for our demographic data ends in 1926. There

is however some notations of place and date of death later than that.

Q. What systems of units are included?

The system covers:

Parishes in Sweden have been the basic building blocks for many other administrative hierarchies.

Q. What is the project's final product?

A demographic data base for more than two million entries. Apart from basic demographic information on family-, household- and social conditions will include translated professional titles in English, cause of death, geographic codes and coordinates for place of birth, place of living and place of in- and outmigration. It is this is last items the project got funding for.

Q. What other publications has your project produced? In particular, please give details of any publications on methodology, and any publications in other languages?


(C) Sources

Q. What base map is/was used to record the information? When was it created, and by whom? Is it published or in an archive?

For the local level we will be using coordinates from the municipality GIS system. For our prototyping we made our own digitised maps on pproperty and block level etc.

We are using a digital version of a Parish map from the Swedish Land Survey from the mid 1880s. Since most administrative changes that have taken place have used the parish as a base unit this is quite satisfactory.

For foreign countries we hope that the workshop will give us a chance to get better boundary files.

Q. What scale was this base map on?

The parish map from the Swedish land survey are based on differently scaled base maps for different areas of Sweden from 1:50.000 to 1:250.000.

Q. If the base map was not already in digital form and your project created a digital version, how was this done?

Q. If your project constructed a record of boundary CHANGES, what sources of information were used? How was this information gathered?

Q. What other maps besides the base map were used? When were they created, and by whom? What scale were they on? What boundaries did they show? How reliable are they?

Q. Did your project make any use of DESCRIPTIONS of boundaries? Who created these? Where are they preserved? What problems did you have converting this information into lines on maps?

No.


(D) End Product

(D2) Geographical Information Systems

Q. What software was used?

We use the SAS-system for storing all our data including GIS-files. But we see this more as an Archive from which we extract and/or export needed subsets.

Q. What were your reasons for your choice of software? If you started again now, would you use the same software?

Q. Describe the data files making up the final system: Are they a standard GIS file format? If not, where can detailed documentation be found.

We store our map data files as simple SAS-files but we export them for use in our specially

Developed applications.

Q. What map projection is used?

The parish map uses the the Swedish Official Coordinate system that the Swedish Land Survey uses for all official Swedish maps. The local coordinates have a really high precision that is actually far to good for our purposes.

Q. Assess the overall accuracy of your digital mapping.

Quite satisfactory for the demographic data we have.

Q. From your existing experience, what methodological recommendations do you have for a larger collaborative project?

... AND MORE GENERALLY:

Q. Whatever the resource your project has actually created, and in the light of your experience with the project, what form of output SHOULD a new project have?

It should focus on methodological issues. Show the potentials and advantage of being able to analyse processes and changes in a time-space context. That is it is not just the boundaries but what we can do with them that should be focused on.

(E) Linked Gazetteers and other Meta-Data

Q. What place-names are built-in to your mapping? Is each point/area (node/polygon) labelled with a single name, or is there some system for linking to different versions of names?

We use the official parish coding scheme with a build in hierarchy and add changes in names or codes over time for our needs.

Q. Does the history/linguistic geography of your area raise special problems with naming places?

Yes. If our prime information lacks municipality or county information. The same parish name

can be found in more than one county.

Q. Have you any plans to make the place-name information gathered by your project available in any other form?

Yes. Since part of our project is standardisation we will as a by product get look up tables which can be used as a separate product.

Q. What sources have you used to research place- and area-names for use in your system?

There are a number of books and official publications documenting changes in the administrative system in Sweden. See Göran Kristianssons listing on the national survey.

Q. Are there any quite separate projects concerned with the history of place names or of administrative hierarchies in your area? If so, please give details? Are they using computers? Are they aiming to make their results available on-line?

There are works going on in many places but usually for smaller areas and the only one taking a national perspective is NAD (see report from Göran Kristiansson).


(F) Preservation, Dissemination and Intellectual Property Issues

Q. Was the GIS/digital resource constructed for use by its creators ONLY, or was it intended for wider use?

Q. Are you willing to make it available for use by others?

Yes.

Q. Are you willing to make it available for free, or for distribution costs only? If not, what plans have you for commercial distribution?

In principle.

Q. Is the resource available NOW? If so, how and from where?

Q. Are there any limitations on access?

The limitation or rather restrictions concern other aspects of our individually based demographic data. But there are ways of handling that.

Q. What file format or file formats is the resource available in?

Q. If the resource is available from the researcher/project that created it, what plans are there for distribution after the project ends/the researcher retires?

Q. What plans are there for updating the data files for use with more recent versions of software?

Q. What plans are there for updating the data files to include the results of more recent historical research?

Q. Do you own all intellectual property rights in the resource created by your project? If not, what other rights exist, and who do they belong to? What limitations have they imposed?

Q. How have Intellectual Property Rights issues limited your project?


© Stefan Fogelvik (Stockholm, May 2000)

Go Back