Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Contents:
  1. Introduction
  2. Resources
  3. Projects
  4. Literature
  5. See Also

Introduction

  • What is GIS?
"A GIS is effectively a form of database. What makes it unique is that every item of data in a GIS is linked to a representation of where the data refer to. This is usually in the form of a point, a line, a polygon (representing an area or zone), or a pixel. Thus in a GIS of census data each row of statistical information would be linked to a polygon that represents the district, ward, output area, or tract that the statistics refer to. Similarly, in a GIS of images of historic buildings each image would be linked to a point that shows where the building is located. A GIS is obviously well suited to mapping data but its uses go well beyond this as it allows a researcher to explicitly research the geographical aspects of the data that he or she is studying" (Ian Gregory, [Historical GIS Research Network>http://www.hgis.org.uk/what_is.htm]).
  • What is HGIS?
"Although GIS originated in the Earth Sciences, since the 1990s its use has increasingly spread to historical research such that the field has become known as Historical GIS. One of the original manifestation of this spread was the creation in a number of countries of National Historical GISs such as the Great Britain Historical GIS and the US National Historical GIS. These are systems that hold changing administrative boundaries linked to census and other data published using them. They usually cover most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (Ian Gregory, [Historical GIS Research Network>http://www.hgis.org.uk/what_is.htm]).

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Resources

  • Online Gazetteers
  • [Geonet>http://gnswww.nga.mil/geonames/GNS/index.jsp]. This website allows for a number of search options, including narrowing by country and feature designation, even by administrative divisions (which became useful in searching only for oblasts/guberniia). Note that palatalized vowel require spelling with ‘y’ rather than ‘i’ as LOC does.
  • [CEIA Gazetteer>http://geo.lib.washington.edu/website/gazetteer/Viewer.htm]. This website searched only within the Russian Federation. Its major benefits were twofold: 1) it de-duped locations that had multiple but close coordinates, which increased the number of unique place names that were otherwise found with multiples in the other websites. As the homepage states, “Contents include over 33,000 name variants, representing approximately 6,900 places in the Russian Federation. Some places have slightly variant location information, and we are in the process of "de-duping" these." 2) It often provided historical data on when certain place names would have been used. This was often helpful to determine which place name was the correct one if multiples were produced. This feature, however, was not always provided with the search results. This information was dependent on sources cited by the gazetteer that could confirm the information.
  • [Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer Server Client>http://middleware.alexandria.ucsb.edu/client/gaz/adl/index.jsp]: The interface of this gazetteer is not very user-friendly but generally very reliable. It also allows searching by feature designation (specifically populated places) but does not allow narrowing by country. Searches seem to be faster on account of this fact.

A feature of all these websites is that they always include variant names. Sometimes the place name in the database matched a variant; sometimes it matched the current/display name. As mentioned above, only the CEIA gazetteer provided more information on these variants as to which time frame they were used. This information was not consistently provided however.

  • Online Maps

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Projects

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Literature

  • Bodenhamer, David. "History and GIS: Implications for the Discipline," in Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship. Redlands: ESRI (forthcoming, 2008)
  • Crane, Gregory, David A. Smith and Clifford E.Wulfman. "Building a Hypertextual Digital Library in the Humanities: A Case Study on London." JCDL2001: 426-434.
  • Goerke, Michael, ed. Coordinates for Historical Maps. Gottingen: Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, 1994. Some of the essays in this book discuss problems scholars ran into digitizing historical maps and some discussed problems with the accuracy of historical maps.
  • Goodchild, M.F., and K.K. Kemp. "GIS Research and Education in the USA." Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Geography Series 4 (1992):68-72. In Russian.
  • Gregory Ian N. A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2003. The first edition is available [on the web>http://hds.essex.ac.uk/g2gp/gis/index.asp]. The second edition is available [as a downloadable pdf file>http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods/publications/ig-gis.pdf].
  • Gregory, Ian N. and Paul S. Ell. Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship. Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography vol 39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007
  • Gregory, Ian N. and Richard G. Healey. “Historical GIS: Structuring, Mapping and Analysing Geographies of the Past.” Progress in Human Geography 31.5 (2007): 638-653.
  • Jessop, Martyn. "The Application of a Geographical Information System to the Creation of a Cultural Heritage Digital Resource." Literary and Linguistic Computing 20, no. 1 (2005): 71-90
  • Jessop, Martyn. "The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship." Literary and Linguistic Computing (Advance Access published [online>http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/] on November 20, 2007)
  • Jessop, Martyn. “The Visualization of Spatial Data in the Humanities." Literary and Linguistic Computing 19, no. 3 (2004): 335-50. Available here, but requires institutional or personal subscription (UIUC subscribes)
  • Jessop, Martyn. “Dynamic Maps in Humanities Computing.” Human IT 8.3 (2006): 68–82
  • Knowles, Anne Kelly, and Amy Hillier, eds. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008
  • Knowles, Anne Kelly, e.d. Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2002
  • Merzlyakova, Irina. "Historical GIS Initiative in Russia." Historical Geography 33 (2005): 147-149
  • Pavlovskaya, Mariannna. "Other Transitions: Multiple Economies of Moscow Households in the 1990s." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94.2 (2004): 329-351
  • Peuquet, Donna. "Making Space for Time: Issues in Space-Time Data Representation." GeoInformatica 5.1 (2001): 11-32
  • Piotukh, Nina V. "The Application of GIS Techniques to Russian Historical Research: the Novorgev district used as a case study" History & Computing 8.3 (1996): 169-183
  • Zerneke, Jeanette L., Michael K. Buckland, and Kim Carl. "Temporarily Dynamic Maps: The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative Experience" HumanIT 8.3 (2006): 83-94
Special editions of journals related to GIS: See also the [Bibliography>http://www.hgis.org.uk/bibliography.htm] of [The Historical GIS Research Network>http://www.hgis.org.uk/index.htm].

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See Also

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