Digital Media and Humanities

Website Review: London’s Pulse http://wellcomelibrary.org/moh/

London’s Pulse is a digitized collection of London Medical Officer of Health (MOH) Reports covering the period 1848–1972. Starting with Sir John Simon’s first report for the City of London and ending with the major reorganization of English local government in the mid-1970s, London’s Pulse provides digitized coverage of the annual reports issued for each of the capital’s succession of local authorities: parishes and district boards, metropolitan boroughs, and boroughs. All told, the collection contains more than 5,500 reports.

MOH reports are a mainstay of historical research into public health, social services, and human welfare at the local level. The existence of London’s Pulse ensures that this will continue. The website has a handy guide on how to use the reports, and short contextual essays not only on the reports themselves, but also covering topics such as the health of Londoners, the professional role of the MOH, and the changing face of London over time. The accompanying timeline, “The Health of London” is well presented, but it is far from exhaustive: here may lie an opportunity for encouraging user contributions and involvement.

For most historical researchers of a certain vintage (myself included), the availability of digitized content such as London’s Pulse induces a micro-weep for all the tedious hours spent poring over content lists, indexes, and tables, and manually extracting narratives and statistical information. The user can still do this if desired: the reports can be browsed and selected by borough or decade and, as with the best digitization projects, the embedded document viewer means that the pages of any report can be leafed through elegantly and at leisure.

However, as one would expect, the power of this website is in what lies waiting to be unearthed from these fully searchable documents. One neat aspect is the way in which the return on a search identifies textual from tabular data. In the latter case, a table’s column headings are also provided in the search results. The user can also elect whether to view only results containing tables. Charts are not separately listed, which is a shame for those interested in the visualization of data, though the word “Chart” can at least be used a search term. While the full text of any report can be downloaded—indeed the full corpus of the reports can be had as a 215 MB raw text file—most stunning is the availability of around 275,000 tables that have been extracted from the reports as individual files. These can be downloaded in a variety of formats (CSV, HTML, XML, and TEXT) to be manipulated by the user (the text and data can be reused under a Creative Commons license CC-BY 4.0). For these two things alone, London’s Pulse is a truly remarkable online resource that I expect will be consulted very heavily by all kinds of users beyond the community of professional historians.

Despite its many strengths, there are some aspects of the site that could be improved or enriched. The uninitiated user needs additional guidance on how the multiple local jurisdictions succeeded and superseded one another. To do this for the period covered would be something of a daunting and complex task, but the following example illustrates why it is necessary. The “Browse Boroughs” function on the home page allows the user to bring up the historical reports for each district falling under a borough’s boundary as it was constituted by the Local Government Act 1963. Select “Southwark,” for example, and the annual reports at various dates are returned for Bermondsey, St George Southwark, Camberwell, St Giles (Camberwell), Rotherhithe, St Saviour’s (Southwark), Newington, and Southwark. Without a great deal of sleuthing, the user can not know which of these reports belongs to a single parish, a vestry district board, a Metropolitan Borough (from 1901), or a Greater London Borough (from 1965). Nor would they know if Southwark (or any of the places that eventually made up the district “Southwark”) had consistent boundaries. This makes handling information for even a...