Editor’s Note Thematic issue Historical Databases (1)

Abstract

The first historical population databases, explicitly dedicated to the digitalization of information extracted from parish registers and censuses prior to the First World War, were created in the 1970s in northern Europe (Brändström 1996). Over the following decades, with the growing entanglements between historical research and computer technology, these tools became increasingly popular in North America and western and northern Europe, culminating in the early 2000s with the outset of the North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) (Roberts et alii 2003). NAPP continues to this day, aiming to provide data integration and support for wide-scale analyses based on the population databases of the North Atlantic regions (https://www.nappdata.org/napp/revision_history.shtml, accessed 15.06.2020), its contributors have also initiated the development of an intermediate data structuring system designed to enable the integration and harmonization of data from other similar historical sources (IDS) (Alter, Mandemakers and Gutmann 2009; Alter and Mandemakers 2014).