ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a new analysis of all the towns of England and Wales at the end of the nineteenth century, based on the systematic transcription of all text appearing on a complete set of maps of Britain at 1:10,650 scale. The resulting dataset comprises c. 340,000 named or labelled features located within urban local government districts, enabling various analyses relating the presence of types of features to town size or geographical region. While this dataset was created through crowdsourcing, here the longer-term potential of automated feature extraction is discussed.
