Comparison of the BBC’s Domesday Project and its contemporary equivalents

Ying Bo Wang¹

¹RMIT University, Melbourne VIC 3001, Australia

Unless otherwise indicated, diagrams included in this report were created by Ying Bo Wang, RMIT University 2013

Abstract

The Domesday Project in 1986 is an interesting work. It is often described as being 10 years too early for its time. It can be described as a Geographic Information System that combines attribute and spatial data over the whole of the United Kingdom. The techniques and methods used in the Domesday Project have an influence on today’s mapping products. This paper compares contemporary mapping applications with the ones in the Domesday Project and examines how the techniques employed have changed. The ideas powering the features of the Domesday Project are still in use today, just that the graphics and user interface is different. Additionally, users today prefer to search for individual sections of information on their own through the internet, rather than buying and using a packaged product like the Domesday Project.

Keywords: Domesday Project, contemporary, mapping

Contents

• Introduction
• Hardware
• Comparison of Hardware
• Software
• Comparison for National Disc
• Comparison for Community Disc
• Conclusions
• References

Introduction

The original Domesday Book was compiled by the order of King William I of England in 1086, to perform an extensive survey covering much of England (Rhind, Armstrong & Openshaw 1988). The term ‘Domesday’ is an alias for the word ‘Doomsday’, as the survey results were treated as accurate at the time it was compiled. This provided a sense of finality to some individuals, hence the term ‘Doomsday’. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s Domesday Project in 1986 was meant to be a massive update to the original Domesday Book. It was released on the 900^th anniversary of the original Domesday Book. From just a data standpoint, it comprised of large amounts of text, journal articles, photographs, official statistics data, animated video with sound, satellite images, aerial photographs and topographic maps (Maguire 1989). This data was meant to be released to the public.

In terms of scope, it was an incredible multimedia project that was essentially an expensive time capsule of what it was like in Great Britain during that time period. Additionally, its data was planned to be of use to lawmakers, geographers, students and businessmen. Until its revival through Domesday Reloaded in 2011, no other organisation has attempted a public project of this scale. To appreciate what was done in the Project, it is vital to review its components and compare it with what is typical for the average person in the United Kingdom.

This paper will (i) compare contemporary equivalent products (within Great Britain) with BBC’s Domesday Project and (ii) analyse whether the techniques and methodologies have changed between 1986 and 2013. The comparison will take into account both hardware and software differences.

Hardware

The Domesday Project had the following pieces of hardware (See Figure 1):

1. Acorn BBC Master micro-computer programmed on BCPL
2. Phillips LaserVision Player
3. Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) Colour monitor
4. Trackerball
5. Two 12 inch Domesday LaserDiscs (LD)

The Domesday LDs would be played on the Phillips LaserVision Player. The Phillips machine takes commands from the Acorn micro-computer and trackerball, which are manipulated by the user. The output is then displayed on a colour monitor (See Figure 2).

Figure 1: Domesday Machine. Left to right: Phillips LaserVision player, Colour Monitor, Acorn Microcomputer & Trackerball. Source: www.bbc.co.uk

Figure 2: Overview of hardware used in Domesday Project

Comparison of Hardware
The modern equivalents of the Domesday Project hardware can be summarised by Table 1 below:

1986 (Domesday Project)	2013
Laser Discs	CD/DVD/Cloud Storage
LaserDisc Player	CD/DVD Player or None
Micro-computer	Personal Computers (PC)
CRT Colour Monitor	Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) Monitor

Table 1: Hardware comparisons between 1986 and 2013

Each of the LaserDiscs used for the Project held roughly 110,000 still images and 600 megabytes (MB) (Goddard and Armstrong 1986). Today, compact discs (CD) can hold up to 700 MB while DVDs (Digital Versatile Discs or Digital Video Disc) can hold up to 17080 MB. The difference in capacity and physical size of the disc means that no new products are recorded on LaserDiscs anymore. Moreover, as more and more data centres are being setup, corporations and organisations are exploring the idea of cloud storage. This removes the need for physical media, enabling users to directly download the data they need from the Internet. As a direct consequence, the LaserDisc Players have been replaced by CD or DVD players. For users of cloud storage, they would not need to use players of any kind.

The micro-computer and the language the software was coded in were getting obsolete to the point that the number of users was quickly dwindling. This is mainly due much faster processor speed (2MHz to 2GHz) and larger memory (128kB to 3GB) of the newer PCs. The CRT colour monitor used has been replaced by LCD monitors. This is mainly due to the smaller physical size and energy efficiency of LCD monitors, compared to CRT monitors. In summary, this meant that all the hardware used for the Domesday Project was rendered obsolete by today’s standards in computing. No company would produce such hardware on a commercial scale anymore.

Software

The two Domesday Discs contain a total of “30 million words, 21 000 files of spatial (or mappable) digital data, 24 000 Ordnance Survey topographic maps, statistical tabulations and time series, picture libraries and TV film clips” (Rhind, Armstrong & Openshaw 1988). This is further elaborated in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3: Overview of content in Community Disc and National Disc. Source: BBC Enterprise.

Comparison for National Disc

The modern equivalents of the National Disc can be summarised by Table 2 below:

1986 (Domesday Project)	2013
Keyword Search	Google, Yahoo, Bing search engines
Photographs	Flickr
Videos	Youtube
Interactive Dataset Graphics	GIS, ArcGIS Online, QGIS
Database in spatial form	GIS, ArcGIS Online, QGIS
Text (Authoritative)	Google Scholar, Project Gutenburg, online journals

Table 2: National Disc comparison between 1986 and 2013

Both Domesday discs could be navigated by use of keyword searching. This has been expanded upon by modern-day equivalents such as Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. Users that searched the national disc to find photographs and videos, now go to the Internet to use Flickr and Youtube respectively. To get scholarly articles, newspaper articles and government reports, a user would now search for them on Google Scholar, Project Gutenburg or other online journals. For interactive dataset graphics as well as the ability to associate attribute data to spatial data, users today will typically use one of the Geographic Information System softwares. Examples include ArcGIS Online, Quantum GIS (QGIS) or GRASS GIS.

Comparison for Community Disc

The modern equivalents of the Community Disc can be summarised by Table 3 below:

1986 (Domesday Project)	2013
Ordnance Survey Maps	Ordnance Survey Database(ordnancesurvey.cok.uk)
Information and Opinions by Community	Yelp!, Tripadvisor, blogs, forums
Pictures within maps	Google Earth, Google Streetview
‘Scalable’ maps	Google Maps, Bing Maps
Aerial Photographs	Online Archives (English-heritage.org.uk)
Satellite Images	Google Earth
‘Surrogate walk’	Google Streetview

Table 3: Community Disc comparison between 1986 and 2013

The Ordnance Survey Maps and Aerial Photographs on the LaserDisc can now be found on the online Ordnance Survey repository and an online archive (English-heritage.org.uk) respectively. Satellite images of the United Kingdom can now be viewed using Google Earth. The way the LaserDisc took to the idea of ‘scalable’ maps was to use analogue images in a hierarchical order. Starting at the smallest scale are the satellite images, before ‘zooming in’ to ordnance survey maps, small scale aerial photographs, large scale aerial photographs, and amateur photographs at street level, in that order respectively. This is replaced by using Google Maps, Bing Maps or OpenStreetMap. The idea of ‘surrogate walks’ was a sort of virtual reality. By interacting with icons, the user could zoom in to that location and navigate the area by viewing still photographs at a street level. This has been expanded upon in Google Streetview.

In summary, for authoritative sources of information like scholarly articles, ordance survey maps or aerial photographs, organisations have opted to store the information on their servers, allowing users to download what information they need for a fee. For community information, blogs and cloud data have taken over with Flickr, Youtube, blogs and forums. All this information, authoritative or community, is accessed through the Internet with keyword searches. In 1986, the Domesday Project gave a packaged product for the user to explore the contents. Today, the user searches for particular sections of information he needs.

Conclusions

The main technological catalyst for this project was the invention of the LaserDisc, and commercial computers able to handle them. However, the problem arises when the BBC designed the hardware to be integral to the Domesday Project. This meant that without the hardware, which was rapidly turning obsolete, there was no way to read the Domesday Discs. This factor along with underestimating the costs for the Domesday Project effectively killed any chance for the Domesday Project to be widely adopted.

Another problem was for users who needed up-to-date exact information. Due to the data being stored on physical media, this made any update difficult. To perform an update, the BBC would have to issue new LaserDiscs to their customers each time. This meant the data on the discs quickly lost currency. This is compared to information found on the Internet, where the user could get the most up-to-date information.

The main reason why no other organisation has done a similar project in contemporary times is probably because users only want to view bits of information they need at that time. Users prefer not to buy and search through a packaged product like the Domesday Project. To do another similar project today, a company would hire individuals to assemble the various components mainly from the internet and write the information onto a DVD.

The methods and techniques used to gather authoritative data for the Domesday Project are still the same as what is used today. This includes satellite images, aerial photographs, scholarly articles and surveys. For community data, this has changed to crowdsourcing from the Internet. Examples include blogs and forums. The ideas behind the individual products of the Domesday Project are still healthy today. The presentation is just different as compared to the past. For example, scalable maps in the Domesday Project are now replicated in Google Earth. This is mainly due to advancement of technology. As long as technology keeps evolving, the method of presenting spatial data will also continue to change. For example, the idea of a ‘Surrogate walk’ itself is a successor to Aspen Movie Map created by the American University MIT in 1978. This makes ‘Surrogate walk’ and Aspen Movie Map ancestors to the modern Google Streetview.

References:

Goddard, J & Armstrong, P 1986, ‘The 1986 Domesday Project’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol.11, Issue 3, pp. 290-295

Rhind, D, Armstrong, P & Openshaw, S 1988, ‘The Domesday machine: a nationwide geographical information system’, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 154, Issue 1, pp. 56-68

Maguire, D J 1989, ‘The Domesday interactive videodisc system in geography teaching’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Vol.13, Issue 1, pp.55-68

Openshaw, S, Rhind, D & Goddard, J 1986, ‘Geography, geographers and the BBC Domesday project’, Area, Vol.18, Issue 1, pp.9-13