Prototype map of Welsh Women’s Peace Petition (Hacathon Hanes 2025)

I had a lot of fun taking part in a history hackathon event, Hacathon Hanes 2025, at the National Library, Aberystwyth on 12 February this year.

There were loads of datasets and resources available to hack and adapt and then create. I decided to combine some of my interests in a one-day project – the history of campaigning, peace, data, and mapping.

In the year 1923 following the horrors of the Great War there was a great effort to organise a peace petition. Ultimately 390,296 signatures were collected from women in Wales, approximately one third of all the women and girls in Wales at the time. Superb! The petition then went on quite a journey. You can read the history.

Here’s a (very very early) prototype of a contemporary map showing petition signatures from women in the Grangetown area of ​​Cardiff.

The map is an effort to:

• convey the campaign in an alternative visual way,
• introduce the women of all backgrounds who signed the petition,
• pay tribute to them,
• see our streets in another way,
• and make you think.

The location data and images come from the Welsh Women’s Peace Petition digitisation project by the library itself and its crew of volunteers.

As a result I’m already seeing my local streets in a different way.

The main technical challenges for me were tidying the data and ensuring consistency, and finding the map locations. In the data each address was in a single field and there was a bit of inconsistency (which reflected the variation in the original documents, to be fair). I extracted the street names with a script and some editing by hand. I used the open data set OS Open Names to get coordinates for the centre of each street (rather than something like the Google Maps API which I believe has restrictions on use). The OS data set offers the location of the middle of the street and a ‘box’ around the street.

Of course my map needs a lot more signatures. There are only 69 in total on the current version. It will be good to be able to extend to the whole city and the whole country of Wales afterwards. I no longer have access to the original data.

I also need a better way to show a cluster of signatures that have come from the same street as well, possibly by using the data for the box around each street. At the moment there’s a bit of random variation in the locations for each street, to prevent them overlapping – this was a quick temporary fix.

Hopefully the project can be updated in the near future. I’d also like to share the code behind it.

Thanks to the Library for the welcome. Here is an article by Jason Evans which includes mention of some of the other projects.