Research
Research Keywords
19th Century, 20th Century, demographic, emigration, immigration, internal migration, New Zealand, occupation, return migration, 19th century British Army, soldiers, Scotland, settlement, step-migration, databases, Digital Humanities
Research Interests
New Zealand History
19th and 20th Century Scottish History
Migration History
Quantitative History
Digital Humanities
Present
Soldiers of Empire, Victoria University of Wellington, 2015-present
Since 2015 I have been working with Professor Charlotte Macdonald on her Marsden funded project looking at the men who served with the British Army in New Zealand in the 1860s. I have been compiling a database of these men, primarily from War Office files, and have developed an R-Shiny app to present this data in filterable and searchable tables, and in graphs. Eventually this will also be downloadable, and interactive maps are under construction.
In line with previous work I have done with migrant data, I am interested in analysing this data for what it tells us about the demographic profile of these men – Who were they? Where were they from? What may have compelled them to join the army? How did they die? Why was this so different to the way their contemporaries were dying in fields of battle across the rest of the British Empire and beyond? Where did they go after their discharged? How many stayed in New Zealand? How many returned to New Zealand having discharged elsewhere? Where, when, and why did they desert? What were their fates?
People of Parliament, Victoria University of Wellington, 2021-present
I am also the senior research assistant/tech consultant on the People of Parliament Project (PoPP), creating the website, overseeing the data collection, and presenting it in an R-Shiny app with searchable and filterable data tables and interactive graphs. This too will eventually have interactive maps, and the data is all downloadable.
Past
Doctoral Research, Victoria University of Wellington, 2016-2010
For my doctoral research I created a profile of New Zealand’s Scottish immigrants who arrived between 1840 and 1920 in order to address who they were in terms of origins within Scotland, age, gender, marital status, and occupation. Other aspects of this migrant flow I examined included internal, step, chain and return migration of the migrants, and individual and generational occupational mobility.
In order to perform the statistical analysis necessary to address these questions, during the first year of my doctorate I created a database of New Zealand’s Scottish migrants (based on a genealogical society register), and developed a code dictionary for Scotland and New Zealand locations and for occupations. Beyond this statistical work, I integrated qualitative evidence to support my quantitative findings in the final dissertation.
Post-Doctoral research, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, September 2011 – August 2013
My post-doctoral research took a 5 per cent sample of selected 1871 Scottish counties and traced the individuals in that census sample forward 10 years to the 1880 US census, and the 1881 censuses of Scotland, England and Wales, and Canada in order to create a profile of those who departed Scotland, those who migrated internally, and those who stayed put over that decade.
Aside from analysis and the development of a demographic profile of those traced between censuses my work on this project included the development of a geographic code dictionary for 1871 census coding, data normalisation, manual linking of data between the 1871 census of Scotland and the 1880 census of America, and 1881 censuses of Scotland, England and Wales, and Canada, plus the development of a quality of match code dictionary for linked census data.
Future
My future research agenda includes the creation of a population database of New Zealand for c.1881. The 1880s mark a turning point in New Zealand history in many respects. Among these, it was a decade of bust after a long period of boom, witnessed such significant events in Māori-Pakeha relations as Parihaka, and marks the beginning of a decline in fertility in the colony as well as a sharp decline in immigrant figures. Yet, due principally to the systematic destruction of the New Zealand Census up to the 1960s, historians have yet to fully examine the people who lived through these events and created these trends. While the published census results and other stand-alone sources from the period can give us a glimpse, without large scale record linkage of the extant records this glimpse is limited by what data collectors of the 1880s were interested to learn. The project will address the ethnicity, origins, age, gender, marital status, fertility, occupational, and settlement patterns of the population of New Zealand in 1881. While these are questions the published census of the colony in that year address, the destruction of the original census forms mean these aspects are not able to be studied in any cross-referential way that was not carried out by the head statistician at the time. One goal of the project would be to make the database constructed available to the public and to other researchers of New Zealand history, offering as much of a substitute for the lost data of the original census returns as possible.
This would be a start point for a larger scale ‘population register’ that would span backwards as far as records will allow, and go through to 1920, capturing demographic data for everyone in New Zealand for any period of time, as far as is possible, creating a resource for other researchers, family historians, and other interested members of the public that would rival census enumerations even if they were extant.
Such a data set would be the centre piece of a New Zealand Historical Data Unit, a depository for datasets created for other historical research that could be used independently but would also, ideally, feed into the population register when nominal information was able to be matched.
Because, hey, when it’s all just daydreams of future research plans, why not aim big eh?
19th Century, 20th Century, demographic, emigration, immigration, internal migration, New Zealand, occupation, return migration, 19th century British Army, soldiers, Scotland, settlement, step-migration, databases, Digital Humanities
Research Interests
New Zealand History
19th and 20th Century Scottish History
Migration History
Quantitative History
Digital Humanities
Present
Soldiers of Empire, Victoria University of Wellington, 2015-present
Since 2015 I have been working with Professor Charlotte Macdonald on her Marsden funded project looking at the men who served with the British Army in New Zealand in the 1860s. I have been compiling a database of these men, primarily from War Office files, and have developed an R-Shiny app to present this data in filterable and searchable tables, and in graphs. Eventually this will also be downloadable, and interactive maps are under construction.
In line with previous work I have done with migrant data, I am interested in analysing this data for what it tells us about the demographic profile of these men – Who were they? Where were they from? What may have compelled them to join the army? How did they die? Why was this so different to the way their contemporaries were dying in fields of battle across the rest of the British Empire and beyond? Where did they go after their discharged? How many stayed in New Zealand? How many returned to New Zealand having discharged elsewhere? Where, when, and why did they desert? What were their fates?
People of Parliament, Victoria University of Wellington, 2021-present
I am also the senior research assistant/tech consultant on the People of Parliament Project (PoPP), creating the website, overseeing the data collection, and presenting it in an R-Shiny app with searchable and filterable data tables and interactive graphs. This too will eventually have interactive maps, and the data is all downloadable.
Past
Doctoral Research, Victoria University of Wellington, 2016-2010
For my doctoral research I created a profile of New Zealand’s Scottish immigrants who arrived between 1840 and 1920 in order to address who they were in terms of origins within Scotland, age, gender, marital status, and occupation. Other aspects of this migrant flow I examined included internal, step, chain and return migration of the migrants, and individual and generational occupational mobility.
In order to perform the statistical analysis necessary to address these questions, during the first year of my doctorate I created a database of New Zealand’s Scottish migrants (based on a genealogical society register), and developed a code dictionary for Scotland and New Zealand locations and for occupations. Beyond this statistical work, I integrated qualitative evidence to support my quantitative findings in the final dissertation.
Post-Doctoral research, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, September 2011 – August 2013
My post-doctoral research took a 5 per cent sample of selected 1871 Scottish counties and traced the individuals in that census sample forward 10 years to the 1880 US census, and the 1881 censuses of Scotland, England and Wales, and Canada in order to create a profile of those who departed Scotland, those who migrated internally, and those who stayed put over that decade.
Aside from analysis and the development of a demographic profile of those traced between censuses my work on this project included the development of a geographic code dictionary for 1871 census coding, data normalisation, manual linking of data between the 1871 census of Scotland and the 1880 census of America, and 1881 censuses of Scotland, England and Wales, and Canada, plus the development of a quality of match code dictionary for linked census data.
Future
My future research agenda includes the creation of a population database of New Zealand for c.1881. The 1880s mark a turning point in New Zealand history in many respects. Among these, it was a decade of bust after a long period of boom, witnessed such significant events in Māori-Pakeha relations as Parihaka, and marks the beginning of a decline in fertility in the colony as well as a sharp decline in immigrant figures. Yet, due principally to the systematic destruction of the New Zealand Census up to the 1960s, historians have yet to fully examine the people who lived through these events and created these trends. While the published census results and other stand-alone sources from the period can give us a glimpse, without large scale record linkage of the extant records this glimpse is limited by what data collectors of the 1880s were interested to learn. The project will address the ethnicity, origins, age, gender, marital status, fertility, occupational, and settlement patterns of the population of New Zealand in 1881. While these are questions the published census of the colony in that year address, the destruction of the original census forms mean these aspects are not able to be studied in any cross-referential way that was not carried out by the head statistician at the time. One goal of the project would be to make the database constructed available to the public and to other researchers of New Zealand history, offering as much of a substitute for the lost data of the original census returns as possible.
This would be a start point for a larger scale ‘population register’ that would span backwards as far as records will allow, and go through to 1920, capturing demographic data for everyone in New Zealand for any period of time, as far as is possible, creating a resource for other researchers, family historians, and other interested members of the public that would rival census enumerations even if they were extant.
Such a data set would be the centre piece of a New Zealand Historical Data Unit, a depository for datasets created for other historical research that could be used independently but would also, ideally, feed into the population register when nominal information was able to be matched.
Because, hey, when it’s all just daydreams of future research plans, why not aim big eh?