UK academics have neglected the history of the freemasons. Andrew Prescott wants to use computers to map the spread of this very British organisation

I have just started working on the history of freemasonry. In 1969, the Oxford historian J. M. Roberts pointed out that, although freemasonry began in Britain and is one of the British social movements that has had the biggest international impact, its history has been neglected by our social historians. In France, by contrast, freemasonry has been the focus of elaborate scholarly investigation.

In Britain the field was long dominated, on the one hand, by anti-masonic conspiracy theorists and on the other by freemasons engaged in antiquarian ruminations into details of internal organisation and ritual.

The past 30 years have seen some new historical studies. Most recently, Peter Clark of Leicester University has placed freemasonry in the context of the emergence of clubs and societies as a major new social phenomenon. Perhaps the most thought-provoking contributions have been by feminist scholars, who have pointed out that the ritual humiliation and oaths of allegiance in the homosocial space of the masonic lodge can be seen as men's attempt to embrace a sense of female powerlessness.

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However, it still seems that the surface of masonic history has barely been scratched. Freemasonry spread rapidly to Britain's colonies and became one of the cultural forces that bound together the British Empire, but there has been little detailed investigation of the role of freemasonry in imperial history. In Britain, the question of how freemasonry bolstered local social hierarchies in the 19th century remains largely unexplored. The starting point for investigation of questions such as these has to be, in Roberts's words, "more counting".

The masonic scholar John Lane produced an elaborate register of masonic lodges established up to 1895, and the growth of further lodges can be easily traced in masonic literature. Lane's work can be used to help map the early growth of freemasonry. An electronic database founded on Lane's work could be used to produce geographic information system packages exploring such themes as the growth of freemasonry in public schools and universities, and the way in which membership fluctuated in times of political and social turmoil.

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Few people know that information about membership of freemasonry from 1799 to 1965 is publicly available. Under the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799, not repealed until 1965, returns of the membership of masonic lodges had to be made to the clerk of the peace and are preserved in county record offices. The material for a compendious database of freemasons in Britain is therefore readily accessible. Again, this could be used for examining the way in which the social complexion of freemasonry changed in different regions at different times.

Data such as this is much more easy to investigate if it can be visualised. One might want to compare the spread of masonic lodges with that of friendly societies, whose organisation owed much to masonic structures. The ability to overlay maps showing the spread and differing membership of these organisations would offer new perspectives.

When I began postgraduate research in history, the most important tool was the card index. Guides to research solemnly dispensed advice on the best size of card, whether it should be ruled or plain, and how information should be arranged. With the advent of easy-to-use database packages, such as Microsoft's Access, scholars can now rapidly interrogate their data in ways that previously would have required days of arduous manual sorting. The researcher can follow up new hunches as the data accumulates, and the database can be shared with others across the internet.

But now I find I want more. The internet and digital images have encouraged us to think of the computer as a tool of visualisation. When investigating how social movements spread and change through time, I long to see the information in my database presented in the kind of animation sequences familiar from satellite weather images.

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Andrew Prescott is professor associate, department of history, University of Sheffield.

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