Geography

Profile

Paula graduated from the University of Birmingham with a BA (hons) in Medieval Studies and she went on to read for an MA at the University of Leicester where her main focus was medieval and landscape history and her dissertation investigated the impact of the development of a late medieval market town on social and economic networks in its rural hinterland.   Since joining the Geography department at the University of Portsmouth she also has completed an Msc in Geographical Information Systems with a dissertation attempting to create a GIS for the layout of properties in a medieval town parish based on evidence from historical texts, maps, archaeological excavations and surviving street layouts.  

Research Interests

Paula has been part of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project team since her arrival in Portsmouth.  During that time she has contributed to three large research projects as well as several smaller ones.  The first major project was the lottery-funded creation of the website "A Vision of Britain through Time" which presents the history of Great Britain through places over the last 200 years.  The second was an EU-funded project to create a time-spatial interface in cultural heritage dynamics which developed an ontology structure to cover all the states of Europe since 1815 in a prototype system.  The third, for which she was team leader, was concerned with expanding the "A Vision of Britain through Time" website.  This included constructing historical political boundaries, adding election statistics, increasing the scope of the digital historic map collection and creating on-line tutorials to help users understand the data and the sources used within the site.

For more information about these projects please see: www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis

Research Topics

Historical GIS - the development of vector GIS material for use with statistics in creating long-running time series for national, regional and local level statistical mapping.

Administrative Unit ontologies - the creation and refinement of a structure used to support the use of multiple administrative unit hierarchies within a single database system.

Historical Gazetteers - the creation and refinement of a administrative units gazetteer, initially for Great Britain, but latterly extended to include Sweden and Estonia in prototype form.

Historical Land Use mapping - the smaller grants have mainly been pilot projects which have involved work on historical landuse mapping.  This has included evaluating the surviving data, creating and editing digital content and investigating the suitability of automated analysis tools for use with the raster map images. 

Her personal research in medieval town landscapes continues.

Key Publications

All publications

Awards

Outstanding Paper Award Winner from the journal at the Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2010