This week was my first introduction to Historical GIS as its own, distinct approach to historical scholarship. In the past, I approached mapping as just another way to display existing historical information, and my public history work has always involved simple walking-tour-like mapping projects rather than complex digital recreations across space and time. Reading excerpts from Gregory and Ell’s book, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship, however, led me to embrace a new, more complex understanding of digital mapping, or GIS, technology as a method of identifying and representing spatial patterns throughout history. As Loren Seibert argues in his 2000 article, HGIS is not simply mapping objects across space to display them, but rather a unique strategy for visualizing and analyzing data that allows for the “analysis of relationships that might not otherwise have been considered.”1 Such relationships, like those between plotted elements across space and over time, can be identified and analyzed through historical spatial recreation and are often overlooked in text-based approaches to scholarship.
The possibilities of HGIS are vast, and its methods have been applied to a wide variety of historical arguments and projects. From attempting to recreate ancient Nubia from the ground up, to dispelling myths about German POWs in the Soviet Union, to uncovering the lived realities of Civil War soldiers in Pickett’s Charge, HGIS project goals are as varied as traditional historical scholarship. The mapped elements themselves are only one part of these public HGIS projects; further historical contextualization and explanation are necessary to make the spatial data useful for both scholarly and general audiences. When the mapped data is properly contextualized, HGIS projects can serve a variety of claims regarding political, social, economic, environmental, and cultural history. HGIS mapping can also help illuminate historical realities, as spatial recreations can convey elements of the human experience that may be difficult to understand through text description alone; for example, just how long a journey took, how crowded a city was, or how far things were from one another.
Though HGIS methods can significantly benefit certain historical inquiries, their value is certainly limited by source availability, material constraints, the subjective nature of much of history, and more. As Gregory and Ell note, sources of historical data are more often than not “incomplete and error-prone,” leading to major lapses in information or misrepresentation while mapping their data.2 Moreover, historical sources are largely subjective and based on first-hand accounts, which can be difficult to translate into objective points on a map. Of course, as with any graphical plotting, there is also the issue of misidentifying patterns based on spatial correlation rather than their true causation. This possibility reinforces the need for sources outside of the map itself, as theories of causation must rely on additional context rather than solely on plotted data points. Finally, as Seibert’s article shows, inputting data into a database for mapping is extremely labor-intensive. Depending on the project scope and the availability of labor and funding, this cost may severely limit historians’ ability to utilize GIS functions.
For my group’s final project, we decided to expand the Center for Mason Legacies’ 100 Years of Black Falls Church collection and map various elements of the collection across the Tinner Hill area that straddles Falls Church and Fairfax County. We will use a vertical approach for our mapping element, focusing on identifying the many community institutions, businesses, and households within the relatively small area. Our sources—photographs, oral history accounts, and more—fall into the category of subjective historical information, what Gregory and Ell deem “qualitative sources.” Though, as they reassure, information from these sources can still be extracted and plotted as Geographic Information.3 In our project, we hope to explore the rich, multifaceted history and resilience of the Black community in Falls Church before, during, and after the city separated from Fairfax County, from long-held local festivals to Black-owned businesses to the first rural NAACP branch.
Until next week,
Alexa
- Loren Siebert, “Using GIS to Document, Visualize, and Interpret Tokyo’s Spatial History,” Social Science History 24, no. 3 (2000): 537-574, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1171611?seq=1, p. 539. ↩︎
- Ian Gregory and Paul Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 1. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 3. ↩︎
Alexa, it was really interesting to hear how your insights into our readings this week impacted the ways you and your group are thinking about using digital tools for your final project this semester! I look forward to getting to see the finished project later during our group presentations!
I agree, especially after our group discussion in class, that GIS mapping has many applications. After my other class on Tuesday, I found that the hard part isn’t the mapping itself, but the limitations projects create and how to maintain them, which makes using this type of data correlation difficult. Luckily, I feel like we’re working on a project with fewer limitations than others.
Hi Alexa,
This is a really great summary of everything HGIS that we dealt with in class! I’m curious what you thought of the QGIS software we experimented with, and whether it will play any part in your group’s work with the Mason Legacies collection. Whether it does or not, how might you navigate some of the issues with HGIS in your project?
Alexa – as our group is just embarking on a mapping project, it was so helpful to walk through your identification of potential issues we might encounter, based on readings for the week. We’ll have to make sure to contextualize whatever analysis comes from our use of HGIS, and watch for potential misinterpretations and misidentified patterns.