Dear all,

Apologies for cross-posting.

Please find below the details of next week's CeRch seminar:

Date: Tuesday, 4th March 2014, from 6.15pm to 7.30pm (GMT)

Location: Anatomy Museum Space, 6th Floor, King's College London (Strand Campus)

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/campuslife/campuses/strand/Strand.aspx

Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is requested:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cerch-seminar-founders-survivors-tasmanian-conv...

The seminar will be followed by wine and nibbles.

All the best,

Valentina Asciutti

Abstract: Founders & Survivors is a multi-university and public collaborative project that is building a transnational and inter-generational data set of life courses generated from the UNESCO recognized convict records of Tasmania. This paper outlines the technical history of the project: mass digitization and archiving online of over 100,000 images; manual scholarly transcription; TEI standard XML data library based on automated and manual record matching and linkage; crowdsourcing using Google Docs to manage over 60 online volunteer genealogists; re-constitution of amalgamated life courses and record linkage; development of customized genealogical database for population and family analysis (Yggrasil); export to statistical programmes (SPSS, Stata). Three grants from the Australian Research Council have funded this work, and the outcomes have been (1) Hamish Maxwell-Stewart's nominal dataset of around 70,000 Tasmanian convicts using Deborah Oxley's transcriptions of the probation era, amplified by full transcriptions of 1 in 25 convicts and linkages to later criminal records (at the University of Tasmania); and (2) the Life Course project run by the authors which has completed life courses researched for all convicts from 91 convict shiploads, creating a reference population of 12,068 men (around 25% of the total) and 5,549 women (around 40% of the total), with another 6188 (at last count) from random ships (at the University of Melbourne). The proportion of convicts researched for life before, during and after sentence, marriage, fertility and death is around 37% of the total number of convicts for whom adequate records have survived. This sample is big enough to enable significant analysis on all-cause and cause-specific mortality; fertility; the life course effects of insult accumulation; temperament and survival; early life influences and intergenerational effects. None of this would have been possible without the combination of information technology, digitized archives, customized software and the thousands of hours of labour donated by volunteers, to the equivalent value of AUD 4 million!

Speakers: Professor Janet McCalman (Centre for Health & Society, University of Melbourne), Dr Rebecca Kippen (Centre for Health & Society, University of Melbourne), Ms Sandra Silcot (Centre for Health & Society, University of Melbourne), Dr Len Smith (Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, Australian National University).

?