Welcome to the first post on the new Statistical Accounts of Scotland Blog. My name is Helen Aiton, and I am the User Support Manager for EDINA, based at the University of Edinburgh. I’m also a member of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland Editorial Board, which means I help to steer the development of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland service. I’ve been a huge fan of the Accounts since I started doing that back in 2001.

In this blog I will give a brief outline of how the Old Statistical Accounts came about – future posts will draw out more of what is in these Accounts, The New Statistical Accounts and will feature guest posts from those who regularly use the Accounts including academics. Please get in touch with us if you would like to share your own guest post on your experiences, thoughts, or personal highlights from the Accounts.

Portrait of Sir John Sinclair.

In the late 18th century – a decade before the first modern census of Great Britain – Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, MP for Caithness, decided he’d undertake the modest challenge of recording the agricultural and social statistics for the whole of Scotland. And, although he’d been inspired by German statistics gathering, he definitely had his own idea of what “statistics” might mean:

the idea I annex to the term is an inquiry into the state of a country, for the purpose of ascertaining the quantum of happiness enjoyed by its inhabitants, and the means of its future improvement; but as I thought that a new word might attract more public attention, I resolved on adopting it, and I hope it is now completely naturalised and incorporated with our language.

In order to gather data on every part of Scotland for his comparative analysis of physical, economic and social life, Sir John wrote to the ministers in every one of the 938 parishes asking them to complete a survey for him. A pretty ambitious survey too… 160 questions… plus an additional 6 in the addendum and then 5 additional questions in his follow up letter about schools, alehouses, housing, employment and jails… A total of 171 questions!

Sir John Sinclair, Extract from the first letter to clergy, 25^th May 1790:

… In many parts of the Continent, more particularly in Germany, Statistical Inquiries, as they are called, have been carried to a very great extent; but in no country, it is believed, can they be brought to such perfection as in Scotland, which boasts of an ecclesiastical establishment, whose members will yield to no description of men, for public zeal, as well as for private virtue, for intelligence, and for ability…

Not everyone replied promptly to Sir John’s first request… This is the fifteenth circular letter to the non-responding clergy date April 1797:

I AM very much disappointed, at not having hitherto received the Statistical Account of your parish. There are very few now deficient, and you cannot imagine the bad effect which the want of those must have, in the opinion of many who are perpetually inquiring, whether the Statistical Account of Scotland is, or is not, completed? It is unnecessary for me, I am persuaded, to urge you more upon the subject. You may easily judge of my impatience and anxiety about it, when I can think about any literary matter at so busy a time in Parliament as this.

I remain, with esteem, your faithful and obedient servant, JOHN SINCLAIR.

And finally by July 1797 the six remaining errant clergy receive a letter from Whitehall in red ink…

SIR JOHN SINCLAIR presents his compliments to

He sets out for Scotland next week, and will be much disappointed indeed, if he has not the pleasure of finding the Statistical Account of                      ready for him; as, on his arrival, he must bring the Work to an immediate conclusion. There are now only six deficient parishes; and from the Draconian colour of his ink, any Statistical delinquent may fee, what the rear rank has to look for. Sat sapienti

Sir John published individual volumes of the parish accounts as the returns came in over the years. Eventually in 1799 – some 9 years after his first requests went out – Sir John had collected twenty-one huge volumes of data about Scotland, its people, its agriculture, its “quantum of happiness”. About 13,000 pages!

Volumes from the Statistical Accounts of Scotland.

The accounts contained so much more than “facts”. There were statistics like the price of sheep; numbers of births, deaths and marriages; records of flora and fauna; and measures of the number of fishermen, labouring servants, Jews and “negros” but it also included rich accounts of daily life of ordinary people in each parish, local history and folklore.

The returns Sir John collected depend on how the minister interpreted the questions. All of the survey responses are seen through the eyes of the minister and so there’s a lot of opinion and judgement there too… and the accounts were edited before publication as well…

The next post will consider Sir John’s questions and show how they shaped the general structure of each of the Parish reports. Here is a one of the more unusual questions

• Question 151: Are the people of the country remarkable for strength, size, complexion, or any other personal or mental qualities

How would you answer that question? And how has your Parish changed since the Old Accounts? We would like to hear your thoughts on your “parish” in the comments below.

If you are looking up your own (or perhaps an ancestor’s) parish remember that anyone can access the Statistical Accounts Online service from anywhere in the world. You can browse images of the pages for free, or you can subscribe to access full transcripts and a wealth of useful additional features and related resources. To find out more you can watch me giving an introduction to the service in this video:

The Research Data MANTRA course is an open, online training course that provides instruction in good practice in research data management. There are nine interactive learning units on key topics such as data management planning, organising and formatting data, using shared data and licensing your own data, as well as four data handling tutorials with open datasets for use in R, SPSS, NVivo and ArcGIS.

This fourth release of MANTRA has been revised and systematically updated with new content, videos, reading lists, and interactive quizzes. Three of the data handling tutorials have been rewritten and tested for newer software versions too.

New content in the online learning modules with the September, 2014 release:

• New video footage from previous interviewees and introducing Richard Rodger, Professor of Economic and Social History and Stephen Lawrie, Professor of Psychiatry & Neuro-Imaging
• Big Data now in Research Data Explained
• Data citation and ‘reproducible research’ added to Documentation and Metadata
• Safe password practice and more on encryption in Storage and Security
• Refined information about the DPA and IPR in Data Protection, Rights and Access
• Linked Open Data and CC 4.0 and CC0 now covered in Sharing, Preservation & Licensing

This release will also be more stable and more accessible due to back-end enhancements. The flow of the learning units and usability of quizzes have been improved based on testing and feedback. We have simplified our feedback form and added a four-star rating button to the home page. A YouTube playlist for each unit is available on the Data Library channel.

MANTRA was originally created with funding from Jisc and is maintained by EDINA and Data Library, a division of Information Services, University of Edinburgh. It is an integral part of the University’s Research Data Management Programme and is designed to be modular and self-paced for maximum convenience; it is a non-assessed training course targeted at postgraduate research students and early career researchers.

Data management skills enable researchers to better organise, document, store and share data, making research more reproducible and preserving it for future use. Researchers in 144 countries used MANTRA last year, which is available without registration from the website. Postgraduate training organisations in the UK, Canada, and Australia have used the Creative Commons licensed material in the Jorum repository to create their own training. The website also hosts a ‘training kit’ for librarians wishing to increase their skills in supporting Research Data Management.

Visit MANTRA and consider recommending it to your colleagues and research students this term! http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/

Usage Statistics

According to Google Analytics, the following organisation’s websites were the top ten referrers to the MANTRA website for the academic year 2013-2014 (discounting Data Library, EDINA and Information Services):

• Institute for Academic Development, University of Edinburgh
• LIS Links (India)
• Digital Curation Centre
• eScience Portal for New England Libraries at University of Massachusetts Medical Library
• Oxford University
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
• Carleton University (Canada)
• Glasgow University
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
• Jisc

Social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Slideshare provided a large number of referrals; several more came from other UK institutions, and HEIs in Australia, the rest of Europe, and North America—University Library pages especially. Forty percent of sessions came  from a referring website.

Visitors to MANTRA over the year came from 144 countries. Google searches accounted for 4,000 sessions, 25% of the total. Nearly ten thousand visits were from new users (based on IP addresses) over the year from 22nd August, 2013 – 23rd August, 2014. Here is a link to a Google Analytics summary spreadsheet extracted from our account.

We expect to have more detailed usage statistics over the forthcoming year due to moving the learning units out of the authoring software (Xerte Online Toolkits) onto the main MANTRA website.

Postscript, 15 Sept: See my Storify story, “Research Data MANTRA Buzz” to find out who’s been talking about MANTRA on twitter!

Robin Rice
Data Librarian