Historical GIS

Abstract

Historical GIS (HGIS) is an interdisciplinary field that integrates the tools and methods of geographic information Science (GIS) into historical research. HGIS projects and studies emphasize the role of spatial context and relationships in understanding the emergence, development, and consequences of historical events. GIS provides techniques and tools to create, manage, display, and analyze historical data. Historical researchers use GIS functions such as digitization, georeferencing, geocoding, and so on to convert spatial features that are presented on a historical paper map or in other archival documents to a digital map that can be recognized by standard GIS software. The development of databases in GIS allows historical researchers to build up a spatial-temporal geodatabase that combines the locational and spatial information with the nonspatial data pertaining to the historical event of interest for data management and manipulation. Another feature of HGIS that makes it a distinct field is the use of GIS for displaying and analyzing historical data. The use of layers in GIS makes it possible to integrate historical data from multiple sources of different time periods for pilot explorations. Researchers can choose among a wide range of geoprocessing and statistical tools to include locations and spatial and temporal relationships explicitly into the analysis of historical events. Early-21st-century development in HGIS work has begun to examine a variety of visualization methods for the incorporation of qualitative data.