Hillier, Amy,
and Anne Kelly Knowles. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS
Are Changing Historical Scholarship. EsriPress, Inc., 2008.
What is Historical GIS?
Historical
GIS is an interdisciplinary and challenging approach to represent history in
its geographic context and use geographic information to illuminate the past. It
requires the use of many interdisciplinary skills such as cartography, graphic design,
analysis and interpretation of maps, textual analysis and bias interpretation (3).
What is the Value of Teaching with GIS?
Other than
teaching GIS itself, there are four main values that students can gain by learning
how to use and interpret GIS. GIS can teach analytical and problem-solving strategies;
such can be seen from maps about the socioeconomic impact of redrawing district
boundaries. It takes thoughtful analytical skills to evaluate the presented
information for potential impacts on communities. GIS also brings value to
education by teaching students the importance of visualization. Visuals can be
scientific, draw people in, and break down language barriers which can be
helpful to any argument put forth by a student. Teaching political and social issues
is another value of educating students on GIS, such as mapping out indigenous
territory in Brazil which could help defend native’s lands from logging. Lastly,
GIS can be a form of pedagogy by letting students map out congressional
districts according to population to their vision of what is fair and analyze
current congressional boundaries such as ones in their own town. This can be a
great teaching method for understanding the concept of Gerrymandering and is
just one example of GIS as pedagogy (63-71).
What are the Implications of GIS for the Discipline of History?
GIS has many
different uses in the discipline. One such use is show cased by the Peutinger Map
project detailed in chapter eight. The traditionally accepted reason to use
this map, as was the reason for its creation, was to show the map of the Roman
world in terms of settlements and roads. However, this project used GIS to answer
if the map’s primary purpose was indeed to show the network of Roman roads. The
project found that it did not, and it was done in terms of geography by
creating a layer in GIS of just roads and just geography which shows where most
of the detail was. Additionally, the map was ported over into GIS on a traditional
map with settlements and roads being laid in conjunction with geography in an
effort to represent the map in more usable terms. This project showed one of
the primary uses for GIS in the discipline, which is to ask new questions or reevaluate
old questions in new ways by using new methodologies and tools (199-218). GIS was
also used to map the husbandry in Concord which besides revisiting old questions
with new tools, this project showcased the use of GIS in local history and as a
method to connect the people with their past and help with local preservation as
this project did by looking at farming locations and land ownership change (151-178).
How are Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Changing Historical Scholarship?
Maps and
spatial data in general are changing historical scholarship by brining in a
more interdisciplinary approach to not only better evaluate historical sources,
but to answer questions with better scholarly accuracy. The Peutinger Map, for
example, was a map that was being used to trace the locations of archaeological
materials and understanding how the Romans understood their world. However, GIS
and spatial data have showed that the traditional scholarship were wrong about
their interpretation on the map’s road-oriented purpose and elucidated it as
geographically centric. This displays that GIS can be used as a useful tool for
historians to use to assist in their scholarship. History has always had
elements that were spatially oriented, and GIS and spatial data can now assist
in understanding those elements of history with more clarity (199-218).
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