Historical Geographic Information Systems and Social Science History

Abstract

The interdisciplinary field of historical geographic information systems (HGIS) took root and flourished at the Social Science History Association (SSHA) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This essay first recounts the growth of HGIS at SSHA and beyond. It then considers challenges that GIS continues to pose for historians and other scholars, such as the unfamiliarity of its conceptual framework and the time and expense often involved in building HGIS databases. The bare-bones visual culture of Social Science History may inhibit submissions by HGIS scholars, whose work typically includes color maps. Yet the enduring methodological and interdisciplinary interests of SSHA members provide a strong basis for continuing involvement by historians who use GIS. The essay closes with new directions in HGIS scholarship, including study of empirical uncertainty, historical gazetteers, textual analysis linked to GIS mapping, and comparison of topology and topography.

Advancing the historical geography of late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine using GIScience: A review

“…The GIScience branch, using GIS to analyze historical scenarios, cartographic materials, and texts, is generally referred to as historical GIS (HGIS) (Gregory & Healy, 2007; Knowles, 2008), although in the last few years the term and themes have gradually been replaced by the concepts of spatial history (White, 2010) and spatial humanities (Gregory & Geddes, 2014). This does not mean that HGIS is declining, but rather implies that the discipline is extending beyond the boundaries of the social sciences and is becoming applicable to a wide range of disciplines (Knowles, 2016). With proven quantitative and qualitative capabilities (Cope & Elwood, 2009; Sui, 2015; Wang, 2006), HGIS enables us to perform various tasks such as interogating cartographic materials (Manzano, Martínez, & San‐Antonio‐Gomez, 2012), analyzing maps and sketches (Pavlovskaya, 2016), detecting land use and landscape changes (Bender, Boehmer, Jens, & Schumacher, 2005; Herold, 2018; San‐Antonio‐Gómez, Velilla, & Manzano‐Agugliaro, 2014), creating deep maps for examining the meaning of places and serving as multimedia conveyors of places and the everyday lives of their inhabitants (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, & Harris, 2015), reconstructing historical landscape and cityscape (whether in 2D or 3D) (de Boer, 2010; Georgoula, Stamnas, Patias, Georgiadis, & Fragkoulidou, 2013; Nakaya et al, 2010; Rubinowicz & Czyńska, 2015), and resolving complex scenarios of past phenomena or catastrophes (Verhagen & Jeneson, 2012; Zohar, 2017).…”

“…The first perception is under the impression that GIScience is all about mapping and making maps. Thus, users holding this opinion tend to underestimate or overlook the capabilities of GIScience as relevant to work or collaboration (Knowles, 2016). The second perception bestows powerful abilities on GIScience, much beyond its true capacity.…”

“…Consequently, a successful study may require a considerably large amount of time to examine many sources and is likely to incur great expense. The total effort of just structuring a digital database and digitizing the GIS‐based extracted features is very demanding, and this is just at the beginning of the study (see Knowles, 2016 and references cited therein). In 2017, I reconstructed the cityscape of Tiberias prior to and after the 1837 earthquake to analyze the resulting spread of the damage and its severity.…”

Loosening the grid: topology as the basis for a more inclusive GIS

“…The past 25 years have seen a proliferation of interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) among humanists and humanistic social scientists (Bodenhamer et al 2010, 2015, Knowles 2016. Researchers have found ways to include qualitative data within the framework of GIS under various banners -historical GIS (Knowles 2000, Gregory and Ell 2007, Lünen and Travis eds.…”

Research Report—"Mapping Political Economies Over Time: Teaching Regional Systems Theory With G.W. Skinner’s Historical GIS Datasets”

“…Skinner, however, did not refer to his methodology as HGIS because the term was not widely used until the 1990s, and consequently his efforts have not been recognized as such. For example, in Knowles' (2016) survey of HGIS in relation to the field of Social Science History, no mention is made of this early project on France largely because Skinner did not publish on this area of his research. But when the new HGIS field began to take shape from different disciplines in the 1990s, early proponents quickly recognized how well-suited the project was for the study of regional economic growth and change (Healy and Stamp 2000).…”