Placing History

Placing History
Author: Anne Kelly Knowles
Publisher: ESRI, Inc.
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 1589480139

CD-ROM contains: Four Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and interactive mapping exercises, some of which extend the scholarly material and addresses new issues related to historical GIS.

Historical GIS

Historical GIS
Author: Ian N. Gregory
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2007-12-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139467719

Historical GIS is an emerging field that uses Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to research the geographies of the past. Ian Gregory and Paul Ell's study, first published in 2007, comprehensively defines this field, exploring all aspects of using GIS in historical research. A GIS is a form of database in which every item of data is linked to a spatial location. This technology offers unparalleled opportunities to add insight and rejuvenate historical research through the ability to identify and use the geographical characteristics of data. Historical GIS introduces the basic concepts and tools underpinning GIS technology, describing and critically assessing the visualisation, analytical and e-science methodologies that it enables and examining key scholarship where GIS has been used to enhance research debates. The result is a clear agenda charting how GIS will develop as one of the most important approaches to scholarship in historical geography.

Spatio-Temporal Narratives

Spatio-Temporal Narratives
Author: Ana Crespo Solana
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2014-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443860999

This book explores new methods and techniques for research about merchant networks and maritime routes of trade during the First Global Age through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a tool to visualize the formation of trading systems, database management, cartography and spatio-temporal analysis in Historical GIS. In doing so, the book focuses on key issues in understanding the birth of the so-called First Global Age (16th to 18th centuries): the integration of spatial economies; the regionalization of markets; the organization of maritime trade routes; and the evolution of self-organizing networks of merchants, producers, communities, and other social agents during the age of expansion. The essays collected here deal with relevant information about historical problems including maritime connections, the organization of oceanic trade and the use of digital cartography and metric analysis of old maps, and social network analysis – commercial networks involved a high level of cooperation and served to move goods and people within a highly open system over an expanding geographic space.

Past Time, Past Place

Past Time, Past Place
Author: Anne Kelly Knowles
Publisher: Esri Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2002
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9781589480322

Collects essays about historical questions that can now be answered through geographic information systems, as well as the problems and limitations of using GIS technology.

Historical GIS Research in Canada

Historical GIS Research in Canada
Author: Marcel Fortin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781552387085

Fundamentally concerned with place, and our ability to understand human relationships with environment over time, Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) as a tool and a subject has direct bearing for the study of contemporary environmental issues and realities. To date, HGIS projects in Canada are few and publications that discuss these projects directly even fewer. This book brings together case studies of HGIS projects in historical geography, social and cultural history, and environmental history from Canada's diverse regions. Projects include religion and ethnicity, migration, indigenous land practices, rebuilding a nineteenth-century neighborhood, and working with Google Earth.

Toward Spatial Humanities

Toward Spatial Humanities
Author: Ian N. Gregory
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2014-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253011906

The application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to issues in history is among the most exciting developments in both digital and spatial humanities. Describing a wide variety of applications, the essays in this volume highlight the methodological and substantive implications of a spatial approach to history. They illustrate how the use of GIS is changing our understanding of the geographies of the past and has become the basis for new ways to study history. Contributors focus on current developments in the use of historical sources and explore the insights gained by applying GIS to develop historiography. Toward Spatial Humanities is a compelling demonstration of how GIS can contribute to our historical understanding.

Mapping Decline

Mapping Decline
Author: Colin Gordon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2014-09-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812291506

Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.

History and GIS

History and GIS
Author: Alexander Lünen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2012-12-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9400750099

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) – either as “standard” GIS or custom made Historical GIS (HGIS) – have become quite popular in some historical sub-disciplines, such as Economic and Social History or Historical Geography. “Mainstream” history, however, seems to be rather unaffected by this trend. More generally speaking: Why is it that computer applications in general have failed to make much headway in history departments, despite the first steps being undertaken a good forty years ago? With the “spatial turn” in full swing in the humanities, and many historians dealing with spatial and geographical questions, one would think GIS would be welcomed with open arms. Yet there seems to be no general anticipation by historians of employing GIS as a research tool. As mentioned, HGIS are popular chiefly among Historical Geographers and Social and Economic Historians. The latter disciplines seem to be predestined to use such software through the widespread quantitative methodology these disciplines have employed traditionally. Other historical sub-disciplines, such as Ancient History, are also very open to this emerging technology since the scarcity of written sources in this field can be mitigated by inferences made from an HGIS that has archaeological data stored in it, for example. In most of Modern History, however, the use of GIS is rarely seen. The intellectual benefit that a GIS may bring about seems not be apparent to scholars from this sub-discipline (and others). This book wants to investigate and discuss this controversy. Why does the wider historian community not embrace GIS more readily? While one cannot deny that the methodologies linked with a GIS follow geographical paradigms rather than historical ones, the potential of GIS as a 'killer application' for digital historical scholarship should be obvious. This book brings together authors from Geography and History to discuss the value of GIS for historical research. The focus, however, will not be on the "how", but on the "why" of GIS in history.

Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence

Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence
Author: Nicholas Terpstra
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-02-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317273664

Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence explores the potential of digital mapping or Historical GIS as a research and teaching tool to enable researchers and students to uncover the spatial, kinetic and sensory dimensions of the early modern city. The exploration focuses on new digital research and mapping projects that engage the rich social, cultural, and artistic life of Florence in particular. One is a new GIS tool known as DECIMA, (Digitally-Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive), and the other is a smartphone app called Hidden Florence. The international collaborators who have helped build these and other projects address three questions: how such projects can be created when there are typically fewer sources than for modern cities; how they facilitate more collaborative models for historical research into social relations, senses, and emotions; and how they help us interrogate older historical interpretations and create new models of analysis and communication. Four authors examine technical issues around the software programs and manuscripts. Five then describe how GIS can be used to advance and develop existing research projects. Finally, four authors look to the future and consider how digital mapping transforms the communication of research results, and makes it possible to envision new directions in research. This exciting new volume is illustrated throughout with maps, screenshots and diagrams to show the projects at work. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of early modern Italy, the Renaissance and digital humanities.