vol263
16 IASSIST Quarterly Fall 2002 IASSIST Quarterly Fall 2002 17
by Jackie Carter, Mark
Brown, Cressida Chappell *
Background
Through a number of strategic
investments by the UK funding bodies
for further and higher education.and
the research councils, the UK
academic community has access to
an electronic Collection of Historical
and Contemporary Census Data and
Resources (CHCC). Individual datasets
have been used extensively in research
but they have been widely under-used in learning and
teaching. To address this issue, the Joint Information
Systems Committee (JISC), under its Learning and
Teaching Programme, has funded a project to develop
learning and teaching materials based on the CHCC.
The JISC is a strategic advisory committee working on
behalf of the funding bodies for UK tertiary education
(FE and HE). This role allows it to provide a centralised
and co-ordinated direction for the development of the
infrastructure and services needed to support this sector
in exploiting ICT for its learning, teaching and research
activities. As part of its remit, JISC promotes the
innovative application and use of information systems
and information technology in tertiary education
across the UK, by funding development projects and
the creation of high quality materials for education.
Currently JISC, in line with other UK initiatives, is
funding a series of development projects to create high
quality resources, which can be directly integrated
into learning and teaching. The outcomes from these
JISC funded projects will feed into the Information
Environment being developed by JISC, to deliver
resources to students, teachers and researchers in
meaningful ways (Ingram, 2002).
The CHCC project is a multi-partner venture involving
six partners from four UK Universities; Essex, Glasgow,
Leeds and Manchester. The project started in October
2000 and will run until September 2003. Further details
can be found at the website .
For details about other projects that are funded under the
JISCʼs Learning and Teaching Programme see Carter et
al., 2002, or the website
What is the CHCC?
The first modern Census in the UK was taken in 1801,
Learning and Teaching with the UK Census
with a Census being conducted once
every ten years since then, with the
exception of 1941. The last Census
was taken on 29th April 2001, with
plans to make the first statistics
available in 2003. The National
Statistics web site is an excellent
source of detailed information
about the UK Census .
Developments in data collection and provision in recent
years have resulted in the UK academic community having
free-at-the-point-of use access (subject to undertaking of
agreements for terms and conditions of use) to a wide range
of digital Census datasets. The first paper in this session
outlines issues concerned with access to these datasets
in more detail. (Bell, 2002). The Collection of Historical
and Contemporary Census Data and Resources (CHCC),
as outlined below, is part of a much fuller collection. It is
important to note that the datasets comprising the CHCC
are physically located in three different locations, and
supported by three different support services.
The CHCC refers to the following datasets:
• The Census Area Statistics (CAS) from the 1991,
1981 and 1971 Census of Population. These are aggre-
gated counts for a variety of geographical areas, such
as county, district, ward and smaller areas. The 2001
Census Area Statistics will become available in 2003.
• The Samples of Anonymised Records (SARs)
released for the first time from the 1991 census. These
are samples of individual census returns both for
individuals and households. The SARs for 2001 will
also become available in 2003. For further informa-
tion about the SARs refer to the website at .
• The Historical Censuses Collection comprises in-
dividual-level data from the 1851 Census (2% sample)
and 1881 Census (100% sample) and aggregate-level
data from nineteenth and early twentieth century
printed census reports. For further details see
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
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IASSIST Quarterly Fall 2002 19
The CHCC provides the most comprehensive and
geographically detailed set of statistics relating to people
and housing in the UK. The 1991 Census covered a wide
range of topics, which describe the characteristics of
the UK population: demography, households, families,
housing, ethnicity, birthplace, migration, illness, economic
status, occupation, industry, workplace, transport mode
to work, car ownership and language. The CHCC thus
provide a unique source of information for students wishing
to explore important social, demographic and economic
issues, in modern or historical contexts. The strategic
importance of the Census means that students from a wide
range of academic disciplines will benefit greatly from a
working knowledge of how to access and analyse these
statistics.
Individual datasets from the CHCC have been widely
used in research (for example, see for list of SARs related
publications). However, the data have been less widely
used in learning and teaching programmes. A number of
factors have contributed to this: requirement for registration
prior to data use; distributed nature of the census datasets;
barriers to access due to hard-to-use interfaces; lack
of knowledge about the existence of datasets and their
potential for learning and teaching; lack of learning
materials suitable for student use across disciplines. For
an excellent summary of barriers facing teachers who use
numeric data see the report by Rice et. al, 2002. We also
reported on barriers to the use of the Census Area Statistics
at IASSIST in 1999 (Carter and Bullen, 1999). The CHCC
project has developed clear aims, objectives and outputs to
respond to these barriers, as detailed below.
Aims, Objectives and Outputs
The primary aim of the project is to develop the CHCC into
a major learning and teaching resource.
The key objectives to assist in achieving this aim are to:
1. Promote increased and more effective use of net-
work based data services for problem-based learning
and student project work across a broad range of teach-
ing programmes;
2. Develop an integrated web-based learning and
teaching system that links together data extraction and
visualisation/exploration tools with comprehensive
learning and teaching resources;
3. Significantly increase the Census user base by
increasing use of the CHCC in learning and teaching;
4. Build new user communities by promoting in-
creased awareness of the CHCC and its learning and
teaching potential;
5. Improve the productivity of teachers by signifi-
cantly reducing the overheads required to incorporate
Census data related resources into learning and teach-
ing programmes;
6. Improve access to key primary data related re-
sources;
7. Minimise delays in getting the key 2001 Census
outputs used in learning and teaching.
Four main outputs will be delivered from this project:
1. A range of learning and teaching resources for
teachers and learners (tutorials, exercises, exemplar-
based studies);
2. A Census resource discovery system to facilitate
discovery of Census data and associated learning and
teaching resources;
3. Improved web-based interfaces for data extraction/
visualisation suitable for student use;
4. Enhancement of the CHCC through adding and
linking other information.
This paper reports on the development of these outputs,
focusing on the learning and teaching materials and the
Census resource discovery system.
Learning and Teaching Resources
A series of learning materials (ʻunitsʼ) are being
developed both by the project team, and commissioned
by distinguished authors who have used Census data in
their teaching. The units are designed to encourage a
ʻpick and mix ̓approach; so that a teacher can choose
from a portion of a single unit (perhaps a simple graphic
illustrating a statistical distribution of, for example,
unemployed males), through to several units built into a
module. The units can be used for both classroom-based
and online learning, and can thus be used both by teachers
and directly by students for independent learning. Such
flexibility was a key requirement behind the development
of the units and indicates our direct response to feedback
from user consultation established at the start of the project.
Another key requirement elicited from user consultation
was the need to allow for customisability of the units.
Authors provide the materials under a non-exclusive
licensing agreement, which permits a teacher to alter the
materials providing s/he credits the source and author of
the original unit. Due to conditions of funding the materials
are available through restricted access to UK Further and
Higher education sites only.
http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/publications/sarpub.htm
http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/publications/sarpub.htm
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Consultation
The development of all learning and teaching materials is
underpinned by a process of consultation and formative
evaluation with potential end users (teachers and students).
The first CHCC user consultation workshop was held in
January 2001, just after the project began. The feedback
from this workshop was crucial in guiding our development
of the learning and teaching units. Several workshops have
been held subsequently in which the first units have been
piloted. The feedback received during these workshops
is being used to improve upon existing units and assist in
the development of future units. A period of piloting is
currently taking place, in which the units are being tested
in live teaching environments. Evaluation from these pilot
studies will be fed into a project report, and used to further
enhance the materials.
Data specific units
Two types of materials are in development. The first are
ʻdata specificʼ, that is, they are based on sets of data from
the CHCC (the CAS, the SARs or the HCC). For UK
access these can be viewed at . It has been necessary to restrict access to
users registered at UK HE and FE institutions due to the
terms and conditions of the projectʼs funding.
CAS units
These resources provide a range of teaching and learning
materials that cover many aspects of contemporary Census
Area Statistics (CAS). Each resource has been categorised
into one of three types: Census basics, Census methods
and Census applications. A guide to the level of difficulty
covering beginners, intermediate and advanced users has
also been specified. This should help the teacher or learner
choose an effective pathway through the resources. For
further details about the units, see ,
SARs units
These units are being developed around two main themes
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IASSIST Quarterly Fall 2002 21
• Introductory data analysis units covering a wide
range of topics starting from basic exploratory tech-
niques through to more formal methods of statistical
analysis.
• Substantive issues units covering more substantive
discipline-specific topics.
All units have a common and flexible format, that can be
readily adapted for use in classroom teaching and self-
study. Each unit comprises three types of materials:
1. Overview - designed for use by lecturers; suitable
for a half hour lecture.
2. Detailed notes - more detailed notes with a greater
degree of statistical content, designed to supplement
teachers ̓notes and suitable for student self learning.
3. Practical exercises - generic and software specific
exercises, suited to incorporation in lessons or for
homework.
Figure 1 illustrates the structure of the SAR methodological
units, each of which incorporates a presentation (in this
case, on the use of graphics), supported by detailed
explanatory notes and exercises. In this example, a slide
in the presentation introduces the use of bar charts. This
provides the platform for a more detailed ʻtext-book ̓
type explanation of bar charts and some linked exercises
that enable students to explore the construction and
interpretation of bar charts with some real data. Exercises
vary in the level of difficulty and format, and include both
computer and non-computer based exercises. For computer-
based exercises, Nesstar provides a user-friendly on-line
interface by which to undertake exercises on subsets of
SAR data.
For further information about these units, including details
of which are ready for piloting, see
HCC units
Units on the following topics are under development
under the main theme of ʻBritish History and the Censusʼ:
understanding the nineteenth century census; household
and family structure; migration in the nineteenth century;
urbanisation; social status; work and employment; using
the census for local history; skills. For further information
about these units, see < http://chcc.gla.ac.uk/ie_index.php>
Combined units
The second type of material that will be developed is based
on common topics across the census datasets contained in
the CHCC. Combined units include introductory resources
that are developed jointly by the project partners, and
include links to the datasets. These units are in the early
stages of development. The topics fall into three main
areas:
1. What is the Census?
These units include: overview; census topics; the
census questionnaire; census geography; coverage;
methods of data collection and coding; census outputs;
the census elsewhere.
2. Using the Census
These units include: confidentiality; data availability
and dissemination; individual versus aggregate data;
change over time.
3. Uses of the Census
These units include: key users and uses of CAS; key
users and uses of SARs; key users and uses of HCC;
what future the census?
Web interfaces
The efforts to develop teaching materials around the
census data sets have been considerably enhanced by
a dramatic improvement in the ease and flexibility by
which users can access the underlying data. For example,
when SARs were first released, their use in teaching was
seriously limited by the need for users to be familiar with a
specialist statistical package, such as SPSS, and to access
the data via mainframe computer. The situation got better
as the improving specifications of PCs enabled users to
put SAR data files directly on to their desktops. However,
the requirement to use a specialist statistical package still
meant the data were inaccessible to many users. As part of
the CHCC project, it has been possible to incorporate new
and user-friendly web-interfaces to Census data, such as
Nesstar (see Figure 1), opening up the teaching materials to
a much wider user group.
Development work is also taking place to enable the
CAS datasets to be visualized online, using interactive
exploratory data visualization software. This software,
called Descartes (see www.mimas.ac.uk/descartes/ for a
sample dataset), has been developed at the Fraunhofer
Institut Autonome Intelligente Systeme (FhG AIS) . It has been developed for the
project, to improve access to the CAS by providing online
mapping of census datasets in a web browser.
Census Resource Discovery System
The Census Resource Discovery System will facilitate
resource discovery of both census data and the associated
learning and teaching materials. It will provide a flexible,
consistent, integrated interface to the learning and teaching
materials and a mechanism for effective resource discovery
across the learning and teaching materials and the census
data. The main goals of the system are to: allow students,
teachers and researchers to discover and locate census data
and associated learning and teaching resources; provide
links to on-line census data and associated learning and
http://www.mimas.ac.uk/descartes/
http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/
20 IASSIST Quarterly Fall 2002
IASSIST Quarterly Fall 2002 21
teaching resources; and provide a means for census data
providers to publicise and propagate the use of their
census data holdings and associated learning and teaching
resources.
The system will provide a web interface to ʻsearch ̓and
ʻdiscover ̓census data and associated learning and teaching
resources through the entry of any combination of a subject
keyword, a geographic area (England, Wales, Scotland, or
Northern Ireland), a time period (date or span of dates) or
a resource type (aggregate-level data, individual-level data,
or learning and teaching resource). Users will also be able
to browse hierarchical lists of census data and associated
learning and teaching resources ordered by subject,
geography, time-period or resource type. A list of items
matching the browse or search criteria will be returned and
users will be able to select and view the full record for one
or more items simultaneously. Tools for project partners
to add, modify and delete metadata records are being
developed and users will be able to maintain a user profile
to store query definitions for future use.
The DDI Codebook standard is being used to describe
census data sets and the IMS Learning Resource Metadata
Specification is being used to describe learning and
teaching materials. The European Language Social
Science Thesaurus is the source for subject keywords. An
SQLServer database is being used to hold the metadata and
Java technologies are being used for the web interfaces. A
Cheshire Z39.50 target will be used to ensure integration
with the JISC Information Environment. The Census
Registration Service and Athens Single Sign On will allow
users to move seamlessly between the different census data
sets regardless of census data provider.
References
Bell, Lucy “Let Us Bring You to Your Census: Recent
Developments in UK Census Data Provision.” Paper
presentation in Delivering the UK Census; Web-based
Access, IASSIST 2002, Connecticut, US, 10-14 June, 2002.
Carter, Jackie et al. “Enhancing use of JISC data services.”
Vine 126, pp.40-47, 2002
Carter, J and Bullen, N. I “Overcoming barriers to the use
of the Census through interactive visualization.” Paper
presentation in GIS and Social Science Data Access Over
the Net, IASSIST 1999, Toronto, 17-21 May 1999.
Ingram, Caroline “JISC Development.” Vine 126, pp.3-6,
2002
Hayes, J. and Carter, J. “Web-mapping the Census:
Developing Interactive Interfaces for Learning and
Teaching.” Society of Cartographers Bulletin, Vol 35, No2,
2002
Rice, R., Burnhill, P., Wright, M. and Townsend, S.
“An enquiry into the use of numeric data in learning
and teaching” [computer file]. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University, September 2001
* Dr Jackie Carter, CHCC Project Manager, MIMAS,
Manchester Computing, University of Manchester, email:
j.carter@man.ac.uk
Dr Mark Brown, Deputy Director CCSR (Centre for
Census and Survey Research), University of Manchester,
UK
Cressida Chappell, Head of the History Data Service, UK
Data Archive, University of Essex, UK
http://datalib.ed.ac.uk/projects/datateach/report/
http://datalib.ed.ac.uk/projects/datateach/report/
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