I am co-investigator on the Digitising Scotland project, in which we aim to create a linked genealogy of Scottish historical records, with Chris Dibben and Lee Williamson at Edinburgh and Graham Kirby at St Andrews. We have focused on automatic classification of certain fields within the records (cause of death and occupation); now we are starting to experiment with various probabilistic linkage approaches. This work also includes Eilidh Garrett and Alice Reid at Cambridge, and Peter Christen at ANU. This work is also related to a work package on linkage methodology within the ESRC-funded Administrative Data Research Centre - Scotland - Scotland with Graham Kirby, Peter Christen and Alasdair Gray. As part of this project we are working with Tom Dalton who I co-supervise who is trying to create a statistically realistic synthetic linked genealogy of Scottish historical records to use as a test case for linkage algorithms. This will be our third attempt at creating such a genealogy - this problem is surprisingly difficult.
