Teaching the basics of historical geography and geographic information systems at the Department of Historical Information Sciences (Faculty of History, Moscow State University)

Abstract

The article describes the experience of teaching the course “Historical Geography and Geographic Information Systems” within the framework of the specialization “Historical Informatics” at the Department of Historical Informatic Science, Faculty of History, Moscow State University. We teach this discipline to third-year undergraduate students. The course includes several thematic blocks. The first one is devoted to Russian historical geography, and the main difficulty is to fit this voluminous course into several lessons and leave time for the remaining blocks. The second block is the basics of cartography, the history of cartography in Russia (that is, source studies of historical maps), and here we can also speak about electronic libraries of raster and vector historical maps of Russia. The third block is devoted to the substantive basics of spatial visualization. This block seems to be the most important: learning to use the proper software is an important, but it is the least constructive part of the research. It is more important to understand how to set tasks correctly and what complexities are typical to this type of visualization. Within this third block we examine both entertainment projects and research articles using historical maps. The last block of issues studied within the framework of the course is the basics of GIS software studying. We study QGIS here: it is officially freeware, cross-platform, it uses the wide-spread shapefile format, and it is well compatible with open Internet services, such as OpenStreetMap and the Google maps. Students learn to draw shapefiles upon raster maps, to attach data from spreadsheets to their vector maps and to create thematic maps, to transform the projections. We hope that our methodological experience will be useful to teachers.