Welcome to the second in a series of debates being hosted on the History Compass Theory & Methods Blog:
“What can GIS offer World History?”
Dates: 3-14 November, 2008
Using Jack Owens’ History Compass article, ‘Toward a Geographically-Integrated, Connected World History: Employing Geographical Information Systems (GIS)’ as a starting point this discussion looks at the role of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in World History.
Short position papers from each participant are posted below, both in PDF format and an onscreen version.
We invite all of you ‘attending’ online to comment and get involved in the discussion! Just use the comments feature on this post to share your views and respond to the issues raised.
Ian Gregory (University of Lancaster) – Position Paper PDF HTML
Stephen J. Hornsby (University of Maine) – Position Paper PDF HTML
Jack Owen (Idaho State University) – Article
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Ian Gregory (University of Lancaster) – Position Paper
Professor Owens is correct in his argument that Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have much to offer to the study of history. “Historical GIS,” as the use of GIS in historical research has become known, has been around for about a decade. In that time large strides have been taken in a number of areas: the development of databases such as the national historical GISs, the development of methodologies suitable for the unique challenges that historical data and historical research imposes on GIS, the growing development of a literature on historical GIS, and most importantly of all, research that uses GIS to provide new insights into historical topics where the interest is not in the use of GIS per se, but instead in the knowledge that it brings to our understanding of a topic within the discipline of history.
At its core a GIS is a type of database. What makes a GIS unique is the fact that each item of data in the database is linked to a co-ordinate-based representation of where the feature is located. This may be a point, a line, a polygon (that represents an area or zone), or a pixel. This apparently crude structure that owes its origins to quantitative, data-rich disciplines such as the environmental sciences has much to offer historical research because a GIS is able to provide information on what, where, and when. The GIS structures information according to location in space, can integrate disparate sources based on where they are, allows us to visualise geographical patterns through maps and other techniques, and allows us to conduct analyses in which the results vary according to where the data under study are located. This has the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of space, place, location and geography in historical research.
GIS is frequently seen as a mapping technology. While I believe this to be a major over-simplification, it serves as a useful starting point in understanding what GIS has to offer to historical research. A map is commonly thought of as the end point of a piece of research, in GIS however it is close to the beginning. As soon a GIS database is created it can be mapped. These maps can be re-defined, analysed and re-created throughout the research process. The map is a way of identifying and describing the spatial patterns within the database. The GIS is thus a descriptive technology. Its ability to describe spatial patterns, combined with a computer’s ability to handle large volumes of data, allows us to describe complex spatial patterns in an easily understandable way. At its simplest this poses questions to the researcher – “why is this happening here but not here?”
More broadly however GIS allows us to challenge existing historical orthodoxies. In a piece of research that I recently conducted I used GIS to map changes in infant mortality rates across England and Wales from the 1850s to the 1900s. The patterns were striking: the largest absolute declines occurred in the cities, this might be expected. The biggest proportional declines however occurred in rural parts of the south and east of the country with the rural north and west showing the smallest proportional falls. The conventional explanation for declines in infant mortality over this period is that they were driven by public health reforms. This does not fit with the patterns that the GIS reveals: rates started to fall before public health reforms were introduced and were occurring in areas where the public health movement would not be expected to have its biggest impact. This is not to say that public health reforms were not important, they probably were especially in urban areas. What it reveals is that to understand change in infant mortality over this period we need to understand that different things were happening in different places. The GIS is able to identify the different stories and where they were occurring. The reduction in rates in the rural south-east shows that there was a significant process driving down rates in these areas but that this failed to happen in the north and west. Urban areas had a very different story, and one whose characteristics were consistent with the public health story.
Here the GIS part of the analysis reaches its limits. We are able to describe the different patterns that occurred in different places and use this to challenge an explanation that was only based on one type of place. What the GIS is unable to do however is explain why the different stories occurred as they did. It is therefore primarily a descriptive approach that challenges more traditional forms of history to produce one or more explanations. Another example of this type of work is Geoff Cunfer’s On the Great Plains that looks at the pattern of dust storms over the entire Great Plains in the early twentieth century. Cunfer shows that there was little relationship between the number of dust storms and the degree to which an area was ploughed; indeed dust storms frequently took place in areas where no ploughing had occurred. This again challenges an orthodoxy, namely that the Dust Bowl was caused by over-intensive agriculture. Cunfer argues that the orthodox explanation originated in detailed studies of only a few areas near the centre of the Dust Bowl. Instead he argues that the Dust Bowl was more closely related to drought than it was to insensitive agriculture driven by the pressures of capitalism.
Image (c) Ian Gregory, 2008
So GIS can and does alter the way that we are able to look at specific historical topics. As currently conceived however it does have some serious limitations. The first is that GIS to date has largely concentrated on quantitative data. This will inevitably make it only of limited use in much historical research which is far more orientated towards qualitative sources, especially texts. The way that GIS represents space is also strongly quantitative. GIS is well suited to representing precisely located features that can be well represented using points, lines or polygons. It is far less suited to “fuzzier” concepts such as cultural regions or to places whose exact location is not known. From a distance it might be thought that GIS is well suited to exploit the “spatial turn”, however the concept of space used by GIS is far removed from the concept used by cultural historians. There are also some higher level problems that limit the adoption of GIS amongst many historians. These fall into three main categories. First, GIS software has become easier to use in recent years but still represents a barrier to entry. Second, using the software is one thing but understanding how it can be applied in historical research and what can be expected from it remains a barrier. Thirdly, creating GIS databases remains expensive and tedious work that often requires different skills to those of conducting research on the database.
This leads me to my questions for Jack which are as follows:
1. Does he agree with my identification of the strengths and limitations of a GIS approach in historical research? If so, what can be done to overcome the limitations?
2. Could he be more specific about how he feels that his project will lead to new understandings of trade in the Atlantic World? Will it be challenging established orthodoxies or developing completely new knowledge? Will it be descriptive or can it also be explanatory?
3. Why do we need “Geographically-enabled history”? After all, we have Historical GIS which is tightly focussed on the use of GIS. Above this historical geography is a well-established field to which people conducting historical GIS research are contributing almost by definition. Why then does he see the need for this intermediate level between the two?
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Stephen J. Hornsby (University of Maine) – Position Paper
In his paper, Professor Owens provides several important arguments in favor of incorporating GIS into historical research, particularly for understanding patterns and processes at the global level. As a geographer, I am sympathetic to his call for greater visualization in the discipline of History and his awareness that the map can be a powerful representational tool. I am also convinced that Historical GIS would be extremely useful in helping to organize large databases, such as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, and to present the material in spatial form. In comparison to a paper map, GIS allows manipulation of data and creation of dynamic animations. If done well, such a GIS would be a powerful aid in teaching students and educating the public. I am also intrigued by Professor Owens’ call for a Geographically-integrated history; many historical geographers are actively engaged in such a project. His suggestion that a Historical GIS could serve as a digital scaffold for a wide range of material, from documents to images and sound recordings, is excellent and something that I have considered building online, based on digital data in the forthcoming Historical Atlas of Maine.
Nevertheless, I remain skeptical of Historical GIS for several reasons. First, there is the obvious issue of data. GIS of the contemporary world are based on enormous databases. As we go back in time, such data diminish. Historical databases can be created but they usually need statistical information and a considerable investment of resources. Are the results from creating large Historical GIS going to justify the expense? Second, non-statistical cultural data are difficult to map and represent in a GIS. Are cultural data going to be left out? Third, as Professor Owens points out, maps and GIS are excellent for showing spatial distributions, but are not as effective as narrative text in representing or explaining change over time. A combination of text and map seems to work well. Fourth, the GIS that I have seen always seem clunky. The aesthetic representation of data in a GIS hardly seems to be have been addressed. I have yet to see a GIS that comes close to the work of a good cartographer. Finally, I wonder about the interest of historians in Historical GIS. History is a discipline wedded to text and narrative; the word is always privileged over the spatial image. Given the general lack of interest by historians in maps and in thinking spatially, I am dubious about the success of Historical GIS in the discipline.
Tags: GIS, maps, World History
November 4, 2008 at 1:26 am |
Tell me more
November 4, 2008 at 4:24 am |
J. B. “Jack” Owens (Idaho State University) – Response to the position papers of Ian Gregory & Stephen Hornsby
I want to express my gratitude to my colleagues for the care with which they read my article and for the valuable comments they offered. I think that I can best move the discussion forward by responding directly to their queries. However, I fear that in doing so, I am moving beyond the interests of many of those in my target audience, who are world historians who might be interested in but have little experience with computational methods of turning their information into knowledge. Perhaps some of these world historians will be willing to call me back to earth with comments and queries about the parts of my article that deal with the ideas of Andre Gunder Frank and Joseph Levenson as important world historians.
In order to offer a combined response to both position papers, which share a number of common elements, I will say something about my conception of Geographically-Integrated History without intending to implicate my departmental colleagues in these views. Moreover, I am going to use some language that my son-in-law, a physicist, says that I should never use in public. I hope to make clear that I see this perspective as a transformative one, which is not intended in any way to be some intermediate stage between history and historical geography.
Geographically-Integrated History is a paradigm with five major components
1. Research projects must involve collaboration among domain experts on the historical systems, geographic information scientists, and mathematical modelers;
2. Data should be georeferenced to geographic place defined by coordinates of longitude and latitude;
3. The history of any place is shaped in significant ways by the way the place is connected to other places and by the changes in these connections over time;
4. Historical periods are complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems that are spatially large, and in more recent centuries global in extension, and that sometimes become unstable, leading to a phase transition, bifurcation, and the organization of a new system;
5. Within such systems, people and places are connected by self-organizing networks that are the sources of innovation and the emergence of new forms.
As both Ian and Stephen indicate, current GIS suffer from some serious defects. Time is handled badly; statistical analysis is limited to relationships among a small number of variables; and precision is demanded to the point where much information about the institutional and cultural environments of human life appears to be excluded from consideration. As one deals with periods before the nineteenth century, as I do, information tends to be particularly vague, uncertain, and incomplete, which makes it difficult to have confidence in the value of using GIS. Visualization can help relieve the weight on human cognition when dealing with complexity and a large number of variables, but GIS visualizations frequently play this role poorly. Although I have yielded the teaching of the course to my colleague, Sarah E. Hinman, I founded my department’s core course “Cartography: History and Design,” and I am especially interested in design (and the graphic arts in general). Both in that course and in my graduate course “Geographic Information Systems in Historical Studies,” I emphasize that one must never use GIS visualizations for any sort of public presentation.
However, computational thinking is essential if we are to address complex problems with success greater than that demonstrated by current work in history and historical geography, and I think that the way to deal with the limitations of current GIS software packages is to extend the concept. I do not want to monopolize discussion by extending my comments too much. Those interested in more detail about my multi-national, multi-disciplinary project “Dynamic Complexity of Cooperation-Based Self-Organizing Networks in the First Global Age [1400-1800]” (DynCoopNet) can now download in pdf an attractive book on the program of which the project is a part, “The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading” (TECT), at the URL:
http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/tect.html
The link is in the lower right corner of the page beside the image of the cover with the photo of the cute monkey. My article is pages 23-35, and at the end, you can read our professional standards for collaborative research, data sharing, and joint publication.
You can read some of our ideas about dealing with time in the article “Dynamics GIS” of my DynCoopNet colleague May Yuan of the University of Oklahoma at the URL:
http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/spring08articles/dynamics-gis.html
Both temporal processes and vague, uncertain, and incomplete information about geographic location and institutional and cultural factors are subject to sophisticated forms of mathematical modeling. For example, my DynCoopNet colleague Michael Sonis of the geography department of Bar-Ilan University is currently completing a book in which he models the diffusion of innovations, including the diffusion of ideologies of “aggressive intolerance” (his term). Another of my DynCoopNet colleagues, the mathematician Emery A. Coppola, Jr., and I have underway an experiment to use the fuzzy rule-based modeling based on the work of Lotfi A. Zadeh to accommodate the representation of degrees of trust among individuals in sixteenth-century smuggling networks within a GIS environment. In economics, quite sophisticated forms of spatial modeling of nonlinear dynamics exist that open the way toward a transformed conception of GIS and visualization. For example, look at the work of my DynCoopNet colleague Tönu Puu (Attractors, bifurcations and chaos: Non-linear phenomena in economics. 2nd Ed. Berlin & Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag, 2003).
I am not yet in a position to respond to Ian’s query about whether our work on cooperation within the commercial networks of the first global age, and not just in the Atlantic basin, will allow us to challenge any existing orthodoxies (of which there are few) and offer explanations of the phenomena we discover. The co-Project Leader of DynCoopNet, Ana Crespo Solana of the Historical Institute of Spain’s Superior Council of Scientific Research (known by its Spanish initials CSIC) is now assembling a variety of data sets about trade routes in the Atlantic basin from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Once this information is processed so that we can use GIS, perhaps we will have a better idea of what we can show.
Because complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems permit only limited prediction (think of weather forecasting), I do not have any idea whether historians will become interested in this sort of work, although I do believe that it will greatly enrich thinking about and understanding of world history. As Joseph Levenson showed so long ago, effective, explanatory narrative depends heavily on our ability to understand complex connections, and geographically-integrated history greatly facilitates the historian’s ability to grasp narrative processes within a dense web of connections. In terms of visualization among historians, I have been intrigued by the growing influence of David Staley’s Computers, visualization, and history: How new technology will transform our understanding of the past (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). Staley is the director of the Harvey Goldberg teaching center at The Ohio State University. Finally, as universities become increasingly dependent on external funding, historians will become marginalized if they do not embrace research forms that attract major grants, and I suspect that geographically-integrated history, with its foundation in the use of computational thinking to transform data into knowledge, lends itself to the formulation of a broad range of exciting funding proposals. The future for academic history departments may belong only to those who are willing to bridge the gaps between existing disciplinary networks to create new ideas.
November 4, 2008 at 8:37 pm |
Many thanks to Professors Owens, Gregory and Hornsby for the timely debate. And thanks as well to Professor Owens for mentioning my work. I am afraid I agree with Professor Hornsby that the historical profession is indeed wedded to the written word; the privilege of which he speaks refers to the representational power historians accord to the written word over the visual image. Quite aside from GIS, historians are generally skeptical of the visual. Historians—with exceptions, of course—rarely rely on visual evidence (for a cogent argument, see especially, Peter Burke’s Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images As Historical Evidence). Historians are even more skeptical of visual secondary sources —of which I would include maps—such as film. Professor Hornsby notes, correctly, that “History is a discipline wedded to text and narrative.” I would make the claim—as I have in a book chapter titled “Finding Narratives of Time and Space” in Sinton and Lund, Understanding Place: GIS and Mapping Across the Curriculum—that maps and other kinds of visual information are also carriers of narrative , albeit a different kind of narrative than that which is conveyed through words and text.
All of this is to say, however, that until there is a sea change in the discipline at large, visual representation of the past will not be fully accepted. History is a discipline that draws in writers; until we include among our ranks geographers, artists, and film makers, the discipline of history will more than likely remain confined only to “word people.”
November 6, 2008 at 2:20 am |
While I agree with much of what Jack, Ian, Stephen, and David have written here, the general emphasis on mapping quantitative data misses some of the most suggestive and qualitative work now being done in HGIS. Actually, the problem may lie in our choice of terms. Although I’ve advocated “historical GIS” as the umbrella term for historical research and teaching that is based on the use of GIS and other geospatial technologies, I’m beginning to think that term is not ideal because it seems to omit the many other methods of geovisualization being employed in historical research. Wish I had another term to propose, but I don’t as yet.
November 6, 2008 at 2:35 am |
Sorry — I clicked “submit” too soon!
One of the greatest potential areas for growth in historical geovisualization is the recreation of past landscapes. Whether one renders a past landscape very simply (such as drawing layers on tissue paper to view over a light table) or in complex, highly professional 2-D maps or 3-D simulated environments, they can be tremendously helpful in prompting careful, creative thinking about places, spatial relationships, living conditions, social hierarchies, and much more. Cultural and social history could benefit greatly from more and better visualization of geographic information. Some questions would require precise recreation of past landscapes, but not all. Rendering past landscapes’ physical conditions could also provide otherwise unavailable information for answering important questions. For example, creating a reasonably accurate digital elevation model and street plan of an industrial town based on British Ordnance Survey maps could enable researchers to test water flow or dominant patterns of air circulation as vectors for the transmission of contagious disease or diseases caused by industrial pollution.
Another very promising area is the use of GIS, cartographic overlay, and animation to reveal change over time and to explore the spatial and temporal relationships between many historical phenomena. These are methods that a group of researchers working on the geographies of the Holocaust will be using in hopes of revealing previously invisible, and therefore unknown, patterns in the growth of the concentration camp system in relation to the movement of front lines, location of industry, and other factors that may have influenced the system’s development. Exploratory visualization of complex variables does require the various kinds of expertise that the comments point to — and it probably requires collaboration at a scale that only some social science historians are used to — but I’d not underestimate the potential for such approaches to excite historians, particularly if major funding agencies show interest in supporting such projects.
November 7, 2008 at 4:17 pm |
I have enjoyed reading this blog, and have learned much from the posts. I am a graduate student in the Historical Resource Management Program at Idaho State University. In response to Ann Knowles comments, I agree that the recreation of past landscapes is an exciting new direction for historians to explore. It requires the ability to model both highly accurate historic spatial data, such as Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps or census data, and vague spatial data, such as personal accounts. There are techniques that have been developed by Geographic Information Scientists which allow for fairly good representation of fuzzy imprecise spatial data within existing GIS frameworks. A good example of work which has been done by Xiaobai Yao can be found here: http://www.hig.se/~bjg/CaGIS.pdf . Although it is possible to represent qualitative phenomena in a GIS it is technically tedious and this is an area in which GIS could greatly improve, both technically and theoretically. With the help of Dr. Sarah Hinman I am currently working on recreating the city of Pocatello, ID, USA in both two and three dimensions in the early twentieth century as a tool to help understand flood causation and the post disaster political response. Through the use of GIS I have been able to uncover some interesting water runoff patterns that contradict the mitigation actions taken to reduce future flooding. The use of GIS to recreate the urban environment and elevation model has greatly enhanced my research.
November 8, 2008 at 3:40 pm |
This is a timely debate on the utility of GIS to the discipline of history. A couple of months ago I posted this following request on H-World: “I am furthering a research started some time ago on how to integrate spatial thinking in the teaching of history. I would appreciate any insights from world historians on how they concretely deal with spatiality in their classes. Is space at all part of their concern when teaching history? Beyond the use of maps, how do they approach the problematics of space with their students, especially undergraduates? Thanks in advance for sharing your experience.” I am sure many will not be surprised to know that I received only one response. While space, as a heuristic category, has become fashionable among some historians, it is still the case that spatial concerns have not filtered yet into the realm of teaching history, especially at the undergraduate level. Even the subfield of “Historical GIS” does not pay enough attention to this issue. Anne Knowles briefly alludes to teaching in her post but does not elaborate on it. For the most part, I would argue, GIS has remained a tool for historical research. Maybe a good illustration of this is J. B. “Jack” Owens’s suggestion that “one must never use GIS visualizations for any sort of public presentation.” Yet as David Staley has nicely put it, “maps and other kinds of visual information are also carriers of narrative, albeit a different kind of narrative than that which is conveyed through words and text.”
November 11, 2008 at 6:27 am |
Even though my contribution of 9 November has not yet been posted as I write (on 10 November, local time), I want to respond a bit to the interesting messages of Derrick Sharp and A.B.
It is too bad that we cannot see some of the visualizations of the project Derrick Sharp describes. His work provides a good example of an innovative project that can be accomplished with current GIS software despite its limitations. Pocatello sits in a narrow mountain valley. I live in the historic Central West Side just one block west of the river. If I walk two blocks farther to the west, I am climbing into the mountains. If I walk four blocks to the east of my house, I am in the middle of the historic downtown area now known as Old Town Pocatello. The terrain has produced complex flooding patterns involving much more than the river, and Derrick’s work is helping us understanding the nature of 20th-century floods.
I apologize to A.B. for missing the query to H-World. I often must put H-World on nomail status when I am out of the U.S. because otherwise I become overwhelmed by all of the messages. I quite agree with the observation that spatial considerations play little role in most teaching of history. At Idaho State University, we are trying to deal with this problem through a transformation of our undergraduate curriculum. We hope also to have an impact on the way that history is taught at the secondary school level. Of course, our Master’s degree program in geographically-integrated history –the M.A. in Historical Resources Management to which Derrick Sharp referred—is designed to train historians, some of whom will become teachers, to give spatial issues a major place in their history classes.
I am afraid that A.B. misunderstood my comment about GIS visualizations. I was responding to Stephen Hornsby’s position paper, in which he comments on the poor cartographic quality of most GIS visualizations. He says, “Fourth, the GIS that I have seen always seem clunky. The aesthetic representation of data in a GIS hardly seems to have been addressed. I have yet to see a GIS that comes close to the work of a good cartographer.” Cartography is a powerful form of communication, but to be effective, a cartographic representation must be carefully designed to convey the desired message. A GIS visualization will seldom accomplish this end because it is frequently cluttered with data that distracts from what the creator wants to communicate and the current GIS software packages still do not permit cartographic production of the highest quality. Frankly, many GIS users do not know much about cartography. Maps and other forms of visual information can certainly carry narratives, as David Staley asserted, but to do so, they must be well designed to communicate clearly the intended message. David has written about the need for such effective visualization designs.
November 11, 2008 at 10:02 am |
I agree with the points that
1) analytical potential of GIS may help to do research in history
2) commercial GIS software is rather weak in dealing with time
As a researcher in geospatial visual analytics and a chair of the Commission on GeoVisualization of ICA (International Cartographic Association), I would like to point you on the emerging research of analysis of movements. Our community is developing methods for detecting patterns and trends in data sets of movement data, examples of patterns are:
– hotspots (places visited more frequently than others) and their development and migration in time;
– “special” time moments with abnormal activity patterns;
– places of frequent starts and ends of trips, their temporal characteristics;
– typical and atypical routes taken between starting and ending points of interest;
– interactions (who systematically meets whom, where and when);
– …
Some of the methods have been applied in historical research, see
“Visual exploration and analysis of historic hotel visits” by Chris Weaver and others, http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ivs/journal/v6/n1/abs/9500145a.html
For the representative sample of ongoing research you may look at Special Issue of Information Visualization on Geovisualization of Dynamics, Movement and Change, see http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ivs/journal/v7/n3/index.html
Geovisualization researchers would like to cooperate with historical researchers who has interesting data sets and problems.
November 12, 2008 at 10:30 am |
J. B. “Jack” Owens Comment (9th November 2008)
Both David Staley and Anne Kelly Knowles have suggested approaches that should excite historians in the near future. It is difficult to convey only in writing any narrative shaped by multi-dimensional situations and nonlinear dynamics, which would include dynamics exposed through landscape visualizations. I wonder if the continued recourse to writing alone, despite its deficiencies as a communication medium, might be due in part to a lack of funding, as Anne suggests, a lack of a research infrastructure for collaboration, and a lack of data in digital form.
On the latter front, I want to point to two other European Science Foundation networks, besides mine, that are developing data, both quantitative and qualitative, of use for geographically-integrated world histories. Books about both research programs are available on their web sites:
Histories from the North – environments, movements, narratives (BOREAS)
http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/boreas.html
Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present (Inventing Europe)
http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/inventing-europe.html
A general meeting of “Inventing Europe” at the end of 2007 provided the occasion for a very interesting meeting/workshop entitled “A Place in Europe: Historical GIS and New Perspectives on European and World History” (30 November – 2 December 2007, Barcelona, Spain). The program can be downloaded from a link on the page:
http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/inventing-europe/events.html
An interesting report, drafted in part by Ian Gregory and entitled “A Place in Europe: Developing a Historical GIS for the European Union”, resulted. One quotation ties the draft report (I have never seen a final one) to our discussion of world history:
“HGIS-Europe will facilitate greater scholarly and analytical attention to the connected nature of world history, including its contemporary expression in the form of a globalized economy and transnational transportation, financial, and communication networks. It is essential to understand Europe’s connections to and influences on the wider world to understand topics such as investment patterns and migration”.
Ian, please say something about what happened to this ambitious report and about what the integrative, collaborative project it outlined might do to stimulate greater attention among historians to the potential for GIS, geographically-integrated history, and geo-visualization of the types that Anne discussed. Thank you.
November 12, 2008 at 10:35 am |
Stephen J. Hornsby Comment (11th November 2008)
In my first contribution, I pointed out that historians are wedded to narrative and as a result few think spatially or use maps. Comments by David Staley and A.B. have supported this observation. I would like to add
a couple of more practical points. So far, contributions to this
discussion are from scholars and graduate students who use GIS. Indeed, several of the contributors are leaders in the field. But for historians and others not familiar with GIS, the prospect of learning GIS or relying on a GIS technician raises the practical matter of deciding how to allocate scarce time and limited resources. In many ways, it is much easier to write an article or book (i.e. a narrative) than to invest time learning GIS techniques, creating a historical GIS database, and generating thoughtful research. In other words, GIS is a technical barrier which carries significant costs. Given shrinking university budgets, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, I can understand why so few historians have made the investment. Moreover, history departments, unlike geography departments, are not known for investing in lab spaces and technical courses. If history departments are not willing to make the investment in labs and courses, then teaching in HGIS has to fall on other departments and units. Such an arrangement is hardly conducive to the growth of HGIS. Perhaps HGIS will remain predominantly in the hands of a few historical geographers in geography departments?
November 13, 2008 at 8:21 am |
I write as the chair of the Department of History at Idaho State University and as a colleague of Jack Owens. I have read all of the entries with great interest. I am not a GIS expert–far from it–but I have had GIS training and am a collaborator, with Dr. Sarah Hinman, in a project that utilizes GIS to analyze the geography of gender and vice in the nineteenth-century urban American West. Since proposing our innovative graduate program in geographically integrated history at Idaho State, Jack and I have had many opportunities to defend our idea to administrators and faculty councils. Nearly all of our colleagues expressed some surprise, at least initially, that our department would be interested in such a program. Since those early days we have progressed to the point where our department is viewed as a central participant in projects on campus that involve spatial and historical analysis, and we have significantly increased interdisciplinary collaborations and grant proposal generation. We were very fortunate to hire Dr. Sarah Hinman, a historical geographer, and we are now at the forefront in campus discussions related to the structuring of interdisciplinary appointments. In addition, we have successfully sought construction funding for the Visual Communications and Cartography Research Laboratory, which we share with the Mass Communication Department. While our involvement in GIS and spatially integrated history has often meant a great deal of explaining, the rewards have been great.
November 14, 2008 at 11:18 pm |
I very much appreciate the contributions to this interesting discussion on the use of GIS for historical scholarship. As the graduate program director for the previously-mentioned M.A. program in Historical Resources Management at Idaho State University, these perspectives are very helpful to my discussions with potential students. I find that such students and colleagues are intrigued by the potential use of this technology but unclear on exactly how it gets implemented in research and dissemination. The perceived problem mentioned earlier by Stephen Hornsby often arises, that the concept is interesting but it requires too many resources in time and equipment to make it usable.
This, it seems to me, is where collaboration is an essential element of success in forwarding the role of GIS in the historical profession. I continue to remind myself and our students in history that it is not fully necessary for them to master all elements of the technology or of the database or mathematical elements behind it. Bringing the historical analysis skills and knowledge to a working relationship with others who provide the technological expertise can lead to a successful product surpassing the capabilities of any one person working alone.
As an environmental historian myself, I share with Anne Knowles the interest in being able to more fully recreate past landscapes which then allows for analyzing the various social and environmental interactions there that shape history. Brian Donahue’s use of GIS in assessing the human ecology of agriculture in colonial Concord, Massachusetts is a particularly effective example of this. (_The Great Meadow_, Yale University Press, 2004)
His book is also an example of the presentation issues mentioned previously. The strength of his book lies in the narrative; it is an excellent story of particular people interacting with a specific place over time. The publisher also was generous enough to print in the book color plates of the GIS files, but these are strong evidence behind the point discussed earlier that GIS visualizations are not effective tools of communication. They are examples of the “clunky” GIS images to which Stephen Hornsby referred. Here is where a skilled cartographer should be part of the collaboration. To communicate historical research effectively and broadly, including work that uses spatial analysis, clear and compelling narratives will remain essential.
November 27, 2008 at 1:23 am |
I am not qualified to enter into the debate about GIS and historical scholarship , but as a student of Joseph Levenson, one of the two ‘world historians” Jack Owens discusses in his article, I will respond to Jack’s request for some comment.
Joe Levenson, trained at Harvard after WW II and Professor of Chinese History at UC Berkeley until his tragic early death in 1968, would not have recognized himself as a “World Historian” and certainly not a geographically oriented one. For one thing, Berkeley’s History department still does not recognize any such field as World History and, as Jack points out, an alleged weakness in Levenson’s work is his lack of “groundedness” in the specificity of place.
As a product of the “China Field” in America in the sixties, I can explain that lack of grounding partly in terms of the Cold War denial of access to the “real China” in those years. As one of my older professors remarked, ” Levenson doesn’t know the smells of China”.
But it was also Levenson’s philosophical inclination towards the abstract and conceptual. He was not a first class archives scholar, most of which were behind the “Bamboo Curtain” anyway, but he had a first class mind and no-one in his day saw Chinese history in global terms more clearly and more penetratingly.
Jack is right to start with Whitehead and the disintegration ( I avoid “deconstruction ” as an anachronism) of an atomistic Newtonian world view as the starting point for what he calls Levenson’s ” relational, connected approach”. He may be wrong in saying editors nowadays would reject Levenson’s prose style as too lengthy and complex, although they might want some postmodernist jargon thrown in. Levenson was, and is, not an easy read. He dealt with complex ideas and , although his insights were as sweeping as they were penetrating, his prose was both elegant and nuanced.
The “abstract entities” and “principal dichotomies” he dealt in did indeed open him to criticism from more “grounded” and research oriented historians and the shift away from intellectual towards social and cultural history has made his abstractions even less palatable, especially to those bound to newer ideas of political correctness. We now have so much more knowledge about China and so much more opportunity to get those smells of reality. But surely it is very unhistorical to judge past scholarship according to present conditions. Levenson opened up the China field conceptually in ways that pointed towards a world view if not exactly world history.
A good part of the tragedy in his early death is that he could not have seen and analyzed the meaning of China’s post Mao reopening to the world. It is also sad that neither his University ( Berkeley) or his students have been able to make more contribution to what Levenson saw as early as 1962 : ” something is emerging.. that really can be called world history, not just the sum of separate civilizations”.
For myself, it was a Levensonian search for larger meaning that led me into the sparsely populated borderlands between History and Art History. There I hope to find clues about what colonialism and subsequent globalization means for “alternative modernities” in an interconnected world.
Levenson shone a powerful beam that we lesser lights can still follow a half century later.
I have tried to use art or art history as a tool to help create that interconnected world history, but without his power to create meaningful and compelling abstractions. Perhaps, before I meet St. Peter or Buddha ow whoever….. He shone a powerful beam which could still help light the way.
October 29, 2009 at 5:46 am |
A bit of a morbid example “Infant Mortality” but a good demonstration none the less.
Todays GIS services does in fact bring a new dimension and greater understanding to the historical perspective.
Visual representation history is communicated faster and more effective and gives greater context to the historical story.