Historical GIS

Hello All!
Welcome back. This week's focus is on Historical GIS.

Historical GIS is situating history in its geographical context in ways to make it illuminate the past (Knowles, 2008:3), essentially incorporating the when with the where. Historical GIS takes qualitative, quantitative, and visual evidence and allows the researcher to create spatial relationships otherwise unseen.  

Teaching GIS helps students refine their problem-solving skills. As Knowles (2008) points out, students not only are faced with solving a problem, but also tasked with identifying that problem and articulating it. Additionally, GIS allows the user to create maps or add layers to imported maps as a means to understand space and place in an ever-changing environment, which provide another method to help support or debunk literary arguments. Teaching students how to use GIS enables them to learn how to create and organize files, build databases, write queries, and use graphics as a means of communication. While learning GIS is akin to learning another language – or at least adding another tool to your methodological tool belt, it is certainly a handy, transferable skill that can be useful in other facets of study and/or life. 

The ability to take geographical information from a multitude of textual sources and map it out for visual interpretation makes one scratch their heads as to why historians haven’t previously been congregating to the GIS bandwagon. One of the difficulties is a general lack of information. History is fraught with missing, contradictory, or otherwise seemingly ambiguous data. One problem I am beginning to see is that sometimes Historians take things at face value (Sorry Historians!) One such example is the Peutinger Map of the Roman World (Figure 1). The surviving copy is likely missing a segment or three and has been for a century or more believed to depict a, for a lack of a better adjective, pretty, “route diagram” (Knowles, 2008:200). However, after digitizing the map and analyzing the different layers, it is now believed to depict the actual geography surrounding these routes. Prior to utilizing digital software to analyze the map segments, the map was brushed off as a unique yet fairly typical route itinerary that was often seen in manuscripts. While this is not really an implication of GIS, it does show how something so simple as a map could be misunderstood for ages prior to GIS analysis.

Figure 1: Peutinger Map. Creative Commons 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0)

Due to minimally recorded and forgotten weather patterns prior to the 1930s, the Dust Bowl was assumed to have been caused by over farming and land mismanagement. However, mapping the involved counties of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico shed light on an assortment of complexities that lead to it. Researchers mapped annual rainfall, percent of counties turned to cropland, rainfall difference during drought periods, and locations of dust storms within the county areas. They also mapped newspaper descriptions of dust storm observations between 1854 to 1896 in Kansas. They found that while farming likely didn’t help the situation, dust storms had been happening fairly regularly in the region but were worse during periods of significant drought. The Dust Bowl was such an event because it was reported much more frequently than in the past and due to a decade long drought that made the situation worse (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Dust Storm in Texas, 1935. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

The point of the case studies to my initial argument about missing contextual information in history is that without zooming out to look at a larger picture, you only see bits and pieces of history – providing an interpretation of an even more incomplete picture.

I think my above case studies show how GIS can and is changing historical scholarship. Using these methods to look at historical text, imagery, etc. allows historians to ask different sets of questions, make new hypotheses, adding to debate and furthering the discipline. While GIS is not a perfect application for all historical needs, it does allow understanding of new perspectives and interpretations of historical events, place, and space.

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoyed your visit.

-The Migrant Isotopist

Knowles, K.A. (2008). Placing History. Redlands, California: ESRI Press.