Methodology

Finding the data: Censuses

The United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland perform censuses every ten years, and the Irish do another on the 6th year of every decade to commemorate the progress of the young nation since 1916. They both use services which host all the census data. There are two options for acquiring this data. The first is a bulk download; this method downloads a .csv file which can be several gigabytes worth of information. Further, this information is coded in a way that makes it difficult to read with the naked eye, and no program to accompany the data which could translate the codes into English. With that in mind, I acquired the data by the second route; the statistics websites allow the user to select data and build charts within the website and then export those data to a .csv file. As the census question change, it can take some interpretation to determine which census questions are polling for the same information. As such, census data from two distant years can be skewed by things like public education on the question, better phrasing, and more accurate digital recording.

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Finding the data: building a dataset

The process of data entry from scratch becomes more complicated as one realizes which data is actually important; unfortunately, that realization can come several items into the list. Also, rare and interesting books are difficult to process without giving them a read. Consequently, the dataset I created from the Michael Krauss collection is only a small amount of the total collection of Cornish work, and a narrow glimpse of the available scholarship on the subject. It is nonetheless a good exercise to include this dataset.