Project title: Aviva-THOTH Hand-in-Hand Archive
Funder: Aviva plc
PI: Alexis Litvine, Cambridge Digital Humanities
Dates: November 2021–June 2022
About the project
In this project, we will digitize a subset of the collection of the Hand-in-Hand insurance policy registers normally held at London Metropolitan Archive, and recently transferred to Norwich using images provided by the archivists at Aviva. We will use these images to create a structured dataset for use by researchers and the public. These registers are particularly interesting because of their long-run coverage that will provide scholars with useful data, and which will serve as an advertisement for Aviva’s heritage as a national insurance institution. It will also fit in Aviva’s celebration of the 325th anniversary of the foundation of the company in November 2021. Containing approximately 1.8M unique observations of London addresses insured against fire for the period 1697-1865, the Hand-in-Hand data will be geolocated to specific locations in London. Partnering with Layers of London (layersoflondon.org), and Humap, we will then be able to offer a striking visualisation of the data created with THOTH, and involve volunteers from Aviva and the general public in matching insurance records to specific addresses in London. We hope that the Humap platform can also be used for crowd correction to facilitate extraction of data from additional volumes outside the pilot subset of registers.
