Historic droughts inventory of references from British twentieth-century newspapers 1900-1999
Helen Baker, Matthew Fry, Nuria Bachiller-Jareno
Context of the dataset
Project Overview
Historic Droughts was a four year (2014 – 2018), £1.5m project funded by the UK Research Councils, aiming to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of past drought episodes that have affected the UK, with a view to developing improved tools for managing droughts in future.
The Historic Droughts project involved eight institutions across the UK: the British Geological Survey the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Cranfield University, the University of Exeter, HR Wallingford, Lancaster University, the Met Office, and the University of Oxford.
Drought and water scarcity (DWS) events are significant threats to livelihoods and wellbeing in many countries, including the United Kingdom (UK). Parts of the UK are already water-stressed and are facing a wide range of pressures, including an expanding population and intensifying exploitation of increasingly limited water resources. In addition, many regions may become significantly drier in future due to environmental changes, all of which implies major challenges to water resource management. However, DWS events are not simply natural hazards. There are also a range of socio-economic and regulatory factors that may influence the course of droughts, such as water consumption practices and abstraction licensing regimes. Consequently, if DWS events are to be better managed, there is a need for a more detailed understanding of the links between hydrometeorological and social systems during droughts.
With this research gap in mind, the Historic Droughts project aimed to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of drought from a range of different perspectives. Based on an analysis of information from a wide range of sectors (hydrometeorological, environmental, agricultural, regulatory, social and cultural), the project characterised and quantified the history of UK drought and water scarcity events since the late 19th century.
Inventory
The Historic Droughts Inventory is a knowledge base of past drought characteristics, drivers, impacts and responses, collated from a range of sources in a number of different sectors. The Historic Droughts Inventory will provide a common reference for policy makers and regulators, water supply companies, agriculture and industry and will enable more consistent, transparent planning.
The Historic Droughts Inventory comprises two main elements, which can be used together to provide multi-sectoral understanding of droughts: 
1.	Hydro-meteorological timelines of rainfall, river flows and groundwater, presented as consistent and comparable drought indicators, which enable understanding of past drought occurrence, based on records extended back into the 19th century through modelling and data rescue.
2.	References to past droughts from the 19th century to the present day from newspapers, legislation (e.g. parliamentary debates), agricultural media, and in-depth oral histories, which provides an improved understanding of the drivers and impacts of and responses to drought, and how these have changed through time. Each reference is consistently formatted, identifying the time and, where possible, place of occurrence, with links to full source materials held elsewhere.
The structure of the Historic Droughts Inventory references is based on previous international efforts to collate drought impacts information. Fields used in the European Drought Impact report Inventory (EDII; http://www.geo.uio.no/edc/droughtdb/index.php) were selected and modified for a database holding many different types of drought references, and not just impacts (as in the EDII). 
THIS Drought inventory 
The Historic droughts inventory of references from British twentieth-century newspapers 1900-1999 consists of mentions of drought in articles published in The Times newspaper between 1900 and 1999 with surrounding context of 10 words on each side of the search term. 
The Times is arguably the most well-known British newspaper and its inclusion in CQPweb, a web-based corpus analysis system, allows us the opportunity to search every issue printed in the twentieth century rapidly and accurately by computer. In total, the inventory was drawn from 5,655,968,521 words in 30,757 texts. 
Methods 
The newspaper issues included in this inventory were taken from the Times Digital Archive, 1785-2012. The texts were processed using CQPweb, Lancaster University’s software platform for large-corpus analysis, as provided by Dr. Andrew Hardie (see Hardie, 2012 and https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/).  
The following search terms were used: drought* OR drouth OR drouths for the period 1900-1949 and drought* for the period 1950-99. The asterisk (*) is a wildcard to indicate that the search considered different forms of the search term: drought, droughts, hyphenated words (e.g. drought-resistant), or adjectival occurrences (droughty). Drouth is an archaic word which was occasionally used in the early twentieth century to mean drought.  
All of the available twentieth-century issues of each newspaper were searched. The initial search output included references to drought which was happening or had happened in both the United Kingdom and countries outside of the United Kingdom and also included general references to drought which were not linked to any particular location.  
Preparation
Issues of the Times within the digital archive were digitised from images of text using optical character recognition (OCR).  Old newspapers often sustain damage as a result of age-related wear and tear, insect activity or poor quality ink or paper and, as a result, the original print might become blurred or unreadable. This has resulted in degrees of error which vary over time and between words of different length, including extra or incorrect letters and omitted letters and words. The pdfs of the original images can be accessed at the Times Digital Archive.
The entries included in this inventory were drawn from corpora of each individual newspaper and extracted through CQPweb, using the concordance tool.  A concordance is ‘a display of every instance of a specified word or other search term in a corpus, together with a given amount of preceding and following context for each result or ‘hit’’ (McEnery and Hardie, 2012: 241). 
This research was primarily interested in references to drought events that affected the UK specifically so, accordingly, this inventory excludes references to drought events outside the UK. To be able to distinguish references to drought events that hit the UK from those that affected places outside the UK, we applied a technique named concordance geo-parsing to the newspaper dataset (see Gregory and Ell, 2007; Gregory and Hardie, 2011; Murrieta-Flores et al., 2015; Rupp et al., 2015; Donaldson et al., 2017). Concordance geo-parsing combines Corpus Linguistics methods (the systematic analysis of large amounts of very large body of textual material) with those from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to automatically identify occurrences of place-names in the surrounding context of each occurrence of the search term detailed above. Here, we considered a span of twenty words to the left and right of this search term. To minimise errors, the geo-parser uses the words in the vicinity of the identified place-names to isolate false positives such as titles (e.g. Prince of Wales), institutional names (e.g. University of Oxford), or specific locations (roads, street, hospitals, schools, etc.). We purposefully kept all mentions of rivers, lakes, reservoirs and water companies (e.g. Yorkshire Water company). To disambiguate homonymous proper-names – such as a person with the same name as a location (e.g. Lincoln) –, the geo-parser resorts to a list of people’s common proper-names which can be edited to fit the purposes of the study. The geo-parser also generates a list of words tagged as proper nouns by CQPweb which it does not consider to be place-names, sometimes due to OCR errors. This list was manually checked in order to include any legitimate UK place-names that had been omitted. Once identified, place-names were then annotated with their geo-spatial co-ordinates.  
Due to the nature of the automated techniques used, in some instances the geo-parsing processes have produced unexpected results, and locations may have been incorrectly identified as being in the UK, e.g. identifying a person's name (e.g."Harrington") in a text as being a location with the same name (e.g. "Harrington" in Northamptonshire) where this name was not included in this geo-parser list mentioned above. 
Entries with multiple locations identified by the geo-parsing process were retained where at least one of the locations was in the UK. Users of the inventory should note that this process removed entries explicitly related to non-UK drought, but there are inevitably entries remaining that relate to non-UK droughts where the text did not contain a specific location within the twenty-word span, and so do not have an identifiable location.
In order to provide information about the geographical locations in a consistent form that enables the number of inventory entries to be readily summarised by region for the purposes of reporting and consistency with other Historic Droughts inventories, the specific locations were mapped to a common standard dataset of regions. The regions selected were those defined by NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics; Eurostat, 2015), as they provided a pre-existing, agreed, freely-available set of spatial areas at 3 different resolutions albeit with variability in the spatial scales within each resolution (NUTS1 being 12 broad regions, e.g. “Scotland”, “South East England”; NUTS2 being larger counties, groups of counties, or groups of unitary authorities, e.g. “West Midlands”, “Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire”, “Kent”; NUTS3 being counties, unitary authorities, districts or groups of authorities or equivalents, e.g. “Oxfordshire”, “South Hampshire”). In addition, the use of the NUTS areas provides consistency with the European Drought Impact Inventory described below (see the Spatial Information section).
The longitude and latitude values of the drought references were imported to a GIS system and, alongside the Place-name, were used to extract the appropriate NUTS region codes using - GIS tools. NUTS information was stored at an appropriate level according to the identified location, i.e. where a UK region was identified in the text, the NUTS1 or NUTS2 field only was populated (depending on the size of the region), and where a specific town or location was identified the NUTS3 field was populated, as well as the NUTS1 and NUTS2 fields, and the Location field. For example, the location “Yorkshire” in the text would result in the NUTS1 field being populated with the term UKE; “Essex” would be UKH for NUTS1 and UKH3 for NUTS2; “Windsor” would be UKJ for NUTS1, UKJ1 for NUTS2, UKJ11 for NUTS3 and would include the specific location “Windsor” in the Location field.
Using the data
The Inventory format is loosely based on the European Drought Impact report Inventory (EDII) which was used as a repository for drought impact information in the Belmont Forum funded DrIVER project (Barker, 2014). The format was selected due to its previous use for capturing drought-related information; it enables both temporal and spatial occurrence of drought instances to be captured (spatial information can be entered at different resolutions) and combined with descriptive content. Due to the varied nature of the contents of the Historic Droughts inventory, some of the categorical fields have not been used as rigorously as in the EDII.
The content of the columns and the data codes used in the Historic Droughts Inventory are described below.
Introductory information
•	Entry ID: The Entry ID will be a unique ID field given to each entry into the Historic Drought Inventory. It will probably be generated and assigned automatically when the data are loaded.
•	Reference: Reference to the source data or document whether it is a web page, scientific article or a government document. 
•	Text:  Sample of text from source containing surrounding 10 words on each side of the search term. 
Where a reference describes the start and end of a particular drought impact, driver, response, etc., these are captured separately. However it is often the case with the sources used in the Historic Droughts Inventory, e.g. newspaper articles, that the only temporal information is the date of the reference itself, in which case this has been used as both the start and the end date. The aim of this field is to capture when drought references occur, rather than to capture the temporal range of a drought within each reference. 
Both start and end date are split across 3 columns, containing the day (dd), month (mm) and year (yyyy). The season is specified using the classification in table A1.1. Season is used where the temporal occurrence is non-specific, e.g. for droughts mentioned within oral histories. Where it is not possible to identify a date of a particular reference to a drought, the approximate start and end date of a drought around that time from the hydrometeorological record has been used, e.g. 1975-1976.
•	Date start (dd): Day the drought reference starts
•	Date start (mm): Month the drought reference starts
•	Date start (yyyy): Year the drought reference starts
•	Season start: Season the drought reference starts (Table A1.1)
•	Date end (dd): Day the drought reference ends
•	Date end (mm): Month the drought reference ends
•	Date end (yyyy):  Year the drought reference ends
•	Season end: Season the drought reference ends (Table A1.1)
Spatial information
In addition to the country and location, the spatial location and extent of the impact, etc. referred to within the reference is recorded using the NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) (Eurostat, 2015). These are standard hierarchical subdivisions of member states of the European Union. There are three classes of NUTS. NUTS1 are major socio-economic regions, whilst NUTS2 and NUTS 3 are smaller areas within each NUTS1. There are 12 NUTS1 in the UK. The NUTS1-3 fields were populated with the corresponding code (Table A2.1) following the method described above (Preparation section). The country is recorded as the only location information for instances where there is no more specific spatial information. Where possible the specific location is also recorded.
•	Country: The Country relating to the drought reference (i.e. England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Great Britain or United Kingdom)
•	NUTS1: NUTS1 region
•	NUTS2: NUTS2 region
•	NUTS3: NUTS3 region
•	Location: Name of the geographic feature (e.g. river name, town, county) specifically mentioned in the reference.
Other fields
•	Media type: Categorisation of the reference to help users understand the origin of the information contained (e.g. newspaper, technical report, oral history, etc.).
•	Sector: Economic sector referred to in the corresponding article.

Annex 1
Table A1.1 – Seasons classification used in Historic Drought Inventory.
Season	Months	
Spring	March, April, May	
Summer	June, July, August	
Autumn	September, October, November	
Winter	December, January, February	
Annex 2
Table A2.1 - UK NUTS1-3 regions.
NUTS1	NUTS2	NUTS3	
UKC	North East England	UKC1	Tees Valley & Durham	UKC11	Hartlepool & Stockton-on-Tees	
				UKC12	South Teeside (Middlesborough, Redcar & Celveland)	
				UKC13	Darlington	
				UKC14	Durham	
		UKC2	Northumberland & Tyne and Wear	UKC21	Northumberland	
				UKC22	Tyneside (Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, South Tyneside & North Tyneside)	
				UKC23	Sunderland	
UKD	North West England	UKD1	Cumbria	UKD11	West Cumbria (Allerdale, Barrow-in-Furness & Copeland)	
				UKD12	East Cumbria (Carlisle, Eden & South Lakeland)	
		UKD2	Cheshire	UKD21	Warrington	
				UKD22	Cheshire East	
				UKD23	Cheshire West & Chester	
		UKD3	Greater Manchester	UKD31	Greater Manchester South (Manchester, Salford, Stockport, Tameside & Trafford)	
				UKD32	Greater Manchester North (Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale & Wigan)	
		UKD4	Lancashire	UKD41	Blackburn with Darwen	
				UKD42	Blackpool	
				UKD43	Lancashire CC	
		UKD5	Merseyside	UKD51	East Merseyside (Knowsley, St Helens & Halton)	
				UKD52	Liverpool	
				UKD53	Sefton	
				UKD54	Wirral	
UKE	Yorkshire & The Humber	UKE1	East Riding & North Lincolnshire	UKE11	Kingston upon Hull	
				UKE12	East Riding of Yorkshire	
				UKE13	North & East Lincolnshire	
		UKE2	North Yorkshire	UKE21	York	
				UKE22	North Yorkshire CC	
		UKE3	South Yorkshire	UKE31	Barnsley, Doncaster & Rotheram	
				UKE32	Sheffield	
		UKE4	West Yorkshire	UKE41	Bradford	
				UKE42	Leeds	
				UKE44	Calderdale & Kirklees	
				UKE45	Wakefield	
UKF	East Midlands	UKF1	Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire	UKF11	Derby	
				UKF12	East Derbyshire (Bolsover, Chesterfield & North East Derbyshire)	
				UKF13	South & West Derbyshire (Amber Valley, Derbyshire Dales, Erewash, High Peak & South Derbyshire)	
				UKF14	Nottingham	
				UKF15	North Nottinghamshire (Ashfield, Bassetlaw, Mansfield, Newark & Sherwood)	
				UKF16	South Nottinghamshire (Broxtowe, Gelding & Rushcliffe)	
		UKF2	Leicestershire, Rutland & Northamptonshire	UKF21	Leicester	
				UKF22	Leicestershire CC & Rutland	
				UKF24	West Northamptonshire (Northampton, Daventry & South Northamptonshire)	
				UKF25	North Northamptonshire (East Northamptonshire, Corby, Wellingborough & Kettering)	
		UKF3	Lincolnshire	UKF0	Lincolnshire CC	
UKG	West Midlands	UKG1	Herefordshire, Worcestershire & Warwickshire	UKG11	Herefordshire	
				UKG12	Worcestershire CC	
				UKG13	Warwickshire CC	
		UKG2	Shropshire & Staffordshire	UKG21	Telford & Wrekin	
				UKG22	Shropshire CC	
				UKG23	Stoke-on-Trent	
				UKG24	Stafforshire CC	
		UKG3	West Midlands	UKG31	Birmingham	
				UKG32	Solihull	
				UKG33	Coventry	
				UKG36	Dudley	
				UKG37	Sandwell	
				UKG38	Walsall	
				UKG39	Wolverhampton	
UKH	East of England	UKH1	East Anglia	UKH11	Peterborough	
				UKH12	Cambridgeshire CC	
				UKH13	Norfolk	
				UKH14	Suffolk	
		UKH2	Bedfordshire & Hertfordshire	UKH21	Luton	
				UKH23	Hertfordshire CC	
				UKH24	Bedford	
				UKH25	Bedfordshire CC	
		UKH3	Essex	UKH31	Southend-on-Sea	
				UKH32	Thurrock	
				UKH33	Essex CC	
UKI	London	UKI1	Inner London	UKI11	West Inner London (City of London, Camden, Fulham, Kensington, Wandsworth & Westminster)	
				UKI12	East Inner London (Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Southwark & Tower Hamlets)	
		UKI2	Outer London	UKI21	East & North East Outer London (Barking & Dagenham, Bexley, Enfield, Greenwich, Havering, Redbridge & Waltham Forest)	
				UKI22	South Outer London (Bromley, Croydon, Kingston upon  Thames, Merton & Sutton)	
				UKI23	West and North West Outer London (Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow & Richmond upon Thames)	
UKJ	South East	UKJ1	Berkshire, Buckinghamshire & Oxfordshire	UKJ11	Berkshire	
				UKJ12	Milton Keynes	
				UKJ13	Buckinghamshire CC	
				UKJ14	Oxfordshire	
		UKJ2	Surry, East & West Sussex	UKJ21	Brighton & Hove	
				UKJ22	East Sussex CC	
				UKJ23	Surrey	
				UKJ24	West Sussex CC	
		UKJ3	Hampshire & Isle of Wight	UKJ31	Portsmouth	
				UKJ32	Southampton	
				UKJ33	Hampshire CC	
				UKJ34	Isle of Wight	
		UKJ4	Kent	UKJ41	Medway	
				UKJ42	Kent CC	
UKK	South West 	UKK1	Gloucestershire, Wiltshire & Bristol/Bath area	UKK11	Bristol	
				UKK12	Bath & North East Somerset, North Somerset & South Gloucestershire	
				UKK13	Gloucestershire CC	
				UKK14	Swindon	
				UKK15	Wiltshire	
		UKK2	Dorset & Somerset	UKK21	Bornemouth & Poole	
				UKK22	Dorset CC	
				UKK23	Somerset	
		UKK3	Cornwall & Isles of Scilly	UKK30	Cornwall & Isles of Scilly	
		UKK4	Devon	UKK41	Plymouth	
				UKK42	Torbay	
				UKK43	Devon CC	
UKL
	Wales	UKL1	West Wales & The Valleys	UKL11	Isle of Anglesey	
				UKL12	Gwynedd	
				UKL13	Conwy & Denbighshire	
				UKL14	South West Wales (Ceridigion, Camarthenshire & Pembrokeshire)	
				UKL15	Central Valleys (Methyr Tydfil & Rhondda Cynon Taf)	
				UKL16	Gwent Valleys (Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly & Tofaen)	
				UKL17	Bridgend & Neath Port Talbot	
				UKL18	Swansea	
		UKL2	East Wales	UKL21	Monmouthshire & Newport	
				UKL22	Cardiff & Vale of Glamorgan	
				UKL23	Flintshire & Wrexham	
				UKL24	Powys	
UKM	Scotland	UKM2	Eastern Scotland	UKM21	Angus & Dundee	
				UKM22	Clackmannanshire & Fife	
				UKM23	East Lothian & Midlothian	
				UKM24	Scottish Boarders	
				UKM25	Edinburgh	
				UKM26	Falklirk	
				UKM27	Perth and Kinross & Stirling	
				UKM28	West Lothian	
		UKM3	South Western Scotland	UKM31	East Dumbartonshire, West Dumbartonshire, Helensburgh & Lomond	
				UKM32	Dumfries & Galloway	
				UKM33	East & North Aryshire mainland	
				UKM34	Glasgow	
				UKM35	Inverclyde, East Renfrewshire & Renfrewshire	
				UKM36	North Lanarkshire	
				UKM37	South Ayrshire	
				UKM38	South Lanarkshire	
		UKM5	North Eastern Scotland	UKM50	Aberdeen & Aberdeenshire	
		UKM6	Highlands & Islands	UKM61	Caithness & Sutherland, Ross & Cromarty	
				UKM62	Inverness, Narin Moray, Badenoch & Strathspey	
				UKM63	Lochaber, Skye & Lochalsh, Arran & Cumbrae, Argyll & Bute (except Helensburgh & Lomond)	
				UKM64	Eilean Siar (Western Isles)	
				UKM65	Orkney Islands	
				UKM66	Shetland Islands	
UKN	Northern Ireland	UKN0	Northern Ireland	UKN01	Belfast	
				UKN02	Outer Belfast (Carrickfergus, Castlereagh, Lisburn, Newtownabbey & North Down)	
				UKN03	East of Northern Ireland (Antrim, Ards, Ballymena, Banbridge, Craigavon, Down, Larne)	
				UKN04	North of Northern Ireland (Ballymoney, Coleraine, Derry, Limavady, Moyle & Strabane)	
				UKN05	West & South of Northern Ireland (Armargh, Cookstown, Dungannon, Fermanagh, Magherafelt, Newry & Mourne, Omagh)	

Figure A2.1 - NUTS1 of the UK (after eurostat, 2015)

References
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