Building a life course dataset from australian convict records: Founders & survivors: Australian life courses in historical context, 1803–1920

Abstract

Founders & Survivors is a multi-university and public collaborative project that is building a transnational and intergenerational dataset of life courses generated from the UNESCO recognised convict records of Tasmania. This chapter outlines the technical history of the project: Mass digitization and archiving online of over 100,000 images, manual scholarly transcription and the building of a prosopography database. This comprises a relational genealogy database integrated with an XML (BaseX) source database. Individual life histories are compiled dynamically from diverse sources, linked by a combination of machine matching and human judgment, and managed by an independent link management module. Using Google Docs over 50 online volunteers crowdsourced the convict genealogies and coded the data. Manual linkage and scholarly verification remained essential for the collation of prosopographical data and manual coding was necessary for statistical analysis.