Historical Geographic Information System Research Articles

Rebuilding the Great Britain Historical GIS, Part 1: Building an Indefinitely Scalable Statistical Database

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GIS) has been rebuilt around a single central table holding all statistics in one column, currently containing 14,541,491 data values. This architecture enables extremely flexible data handling, but requires that the context of each data value be captured entirely as metadata. Statistical reporting areas are defined via an ontology of administrative units, in which hierarchical relationships are compulsory while boundary polygons are optional. What a number measures is recorded via a relational implementation of the Data Documentation Initiative standard, locating each value within an n-dimensional matrix, or nCube, whose dimensions are variables such as age, gender, and occupation. The data library can be extended to additional countries or more statistical topics without adding any database tables.

Urbanization and Transportation in Finland, 1880–1970

Analysis based on historical geographical information systems (hgis) databases can be used to trace the relationship between railway infrastructure and population change in Finland from 1880 to 1970. The use of accessibility calculations, statistical analyses, and gis reveals that Finland's population was almost evenly distributed in 1880, when railway development began, but that immigration to cities was well underway by 1970, when motorization by road was rapidly becoming the primary form of transportation.

Geographical Information Systems and the Study of History

The articles in this special issue are unique in their use of historical geographical information systems (hgis) to explore a common theme—transport infrastructure and its effects on population distribution in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Collectively and individually, they demonstrate how to integrate spatial analysis into historical research and how to bring a historical dimension to geographical analyses.

Spatial History: Railways, Uneven Development, and Population Change in France and Great Britain, 1850–1914

A comparative spatial history combining historical narrative, geographical thinking, and spatial analysis of historical data offers new perspectives on railway expansion and its effects in France and Great Britain during the long nineteenth century. Accessible rail transport in the rural regions of both countries opened new economic opportunities in agriculture, extractive industries, and service trades, helping to revitalize rural communities and decrease their rates of out-migration. In France, long-standing economic disparities between the developed north and the less-productive south gradually reduced. These conclusions are based, in part, on the use of historical geographical information systems (hgis) and spatial statistics, illustrating a component of spatial history.

Spatial cyberinfrastructures, ontologies, and the humanities

We report on research into building a cyberinfrastructure for Chinese biographical and geographic data. Our cyberinfrastructure contains (i) the McGill-Harvard-Yenching Library Ming Qing Women's Writings database (MQWW), the only online database on historical Chinese women's writings, (ii) the China Biographical Database, the authority for Chinese historical people, and (iii) the China Historical Geographical Information System, one of the first historical geographic information systems. Key to this integration is that linked databases retain separate identities as bases of knowledge, while they possess sufficient semantic interoperability to allow for multidatabase concepts and to support cross-database queries on an ad hoc basis. Computational ontologies create underlying semantics for database access. This paper focuses on the spatial component in a humanities cyberinfrastructure, which includes issues of conflicting data, heterogeneous data models, disambiguation, and geographic scale. First, we describe the methodology for integrating the databases. Then we detail the system architecture, which includes a tier of ontologies and schema. We describe the user interface and applications that allow for cross-database queries. For instance, users should be able to analyze the data, examine hypotheses on spatial and temporal relationships, and generate historical maps with datasets from MQWW for research, teaching, and publication on Chinese women writers, their familial relations, publishing venues, and the literary and social communities. Last, we discuss the social side of cyberinfrastructure development, as people are considered to be as critical as the technical components for its success.

Trading Places

The economies of modern cities are dependent on an advanced retail system; so too are the people who inhabit them. The origin and evolution of retailing in London, Canada, was studied using a historical geographic information system (GIS) to document the relationship between a city and its retail sector. Visualization and spatial-statistical techniques afforded by the historical GIS were implemented to study change over time. The locations of retailers and the types of the goods they sold were examined for four periods in the city’s early history: 1844, 1863, 1881, and 1916. The distances traveled to shop were also calculated for a variety of goods. The results indicate that the retail system was ingrained in the development of the city, showing marked locational patterns and a high degree of rationality in the shopkeepers' business strategies. Mapping the retail landscape in each era using historical GIS allowed for the examination of the relationship between retail and residential development in the growing city. While the downtown area remained the primary retail district for the city, considerable retail expansion also occurred at the urban periphery during this early stage of the city's development.

Denny Regrade, 1893–2008

Creating a historical narrative for a place has traditionally entailed consulting the source materials that have managed to survive over time, interpreting those records, and constructing a narrative for how that place came to be. Until recently historians have often viewed technology and its ability to contribute to this process with skepticism if not outright hostility. Contrary to this view, geographic information systems (GIS) can add to, and not detract from, the creation of a historical narrative for a specific place. Apart from the Great Fire of Seattle in 1889, the regrading and removal of Denny Hill (1898–1930) arguably represents the most iconic period in Seattle’s urban history. The Denny Regrade, the removal of a 245-foot hill that once buttressed Seattle’s downtown retail and commercial districts, remains prominent in the historical consciousness of Seattle, as it represents a period of intense and dramatic change. GIS, and in particular historical GIS, offers the opportunity to more deeply explore and re-create the history of the Denny Regrade due to its inherent ability to spatially integrate, visualize, and analyze information. Using the Denny Regrade as a case study, this article examines the application of historical GIS to a topic in urban history across an extended temporal scale (1893–2008). Three main areas are discussed. The historical context of the Denny Regrade is explored; components of the historical GIS developed for the study are examined; and examples of geovisualizations and new historical data and information are presented.

Introduction to Historical GIS and the Study of Urban History

Over the past decade or so geographic information systems (GIS) methodology has become an accepted tool in historical research (Gregory and Ell 2007; Knowles 2008). Although often regarded as a mapping tool, GIS is perhaps better thought of as a type of database. What makes a GIS database unique is that a location is stored for each item of data, with this location taking any of a variety of forms: a point, a line, a polygon representing an area or zone, or, in the case of a raster system, a pixel. GIS can then present instantly on the screen a map showing the distribution of any variable or combination of variables in any of the chosen locational formats. This electronic display of information becomes an analytic tool, allowing the refinement of research questions, with answers displayed instantly: GIS creates a display of information once visible only in paper form, drawn slowly and expensively first by cartographers and then by vector plotters. GIS and its associated tools transform mapping into a dynamic exploratory process.

The Southern Great Plains Wind Erosion Maps of 1936-1937

In 1936–1937 the US Soil Conservation Service conducted a reconnaissance survey of the Dust Bowl, the area of worst wind erosion on the southern Great Plains. Providing farm-level detail and covering twenty-six counties in five states—some twenty-seven million acres or forty-two thousand square miles—this survey represents our best record of land use and soil erosion at the peak of the 1930s crisis. The project generated well-designed and information-rich maps for each county, but their graphic nature and large size has left them virtually unknown to agricultural and environmental historians of the Dust Bowl. The Historical Geographic Information Systems Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan has now digitized these maps and built an HGIS that will allow analysis of this information for the first time in seventyfive years.

Using the Newly‐created ILE DBMS to Better Represent Temporal and Historical GIS Data

AbstractThis article introduces a type of DBMS called the Intentionally‐Linked Entities (ILE) DBMS for use as the basis for temporal and historical Geographical Information Systems. ILE represents each entity in a database only once, thereby mostly eliminating redundancy and fragmentation, two major problems in Relational and other database systems. These advantages of ILE are realized by using relationship objects and pointers to implement all of the relationships among data entities in a native fashion using dynamically‐allocated linked data structures. ILE can be considered to be a modern and extended implementation of the E/R data model. ILE also facilitates storage of things that are more faithful to the historical records, such as gazetteer entries of places with imprecisely known or unknown locations. This is difficult in Relational database systems but is a routine task using ILE because ILE is implemented using modern memory allocation techniques. We use the China Historical GIS (CHGIS) and other databases to illustrate the advantages of ILE. This is accomplished by modeling these databases in ILE and comparing them to the existing Relational implementations.

Invitation to Mapping: How GIS Can Facilitate New Discoveries in Urban and Planning History

Urban and planning historians frequently focus on inherently spatial topics such as migration, segregation, gentrification, and suburbanization and rely on historical maps as primary sources, but they rarely use geographic information systems (GIS) as a research method for analyzing spatial patterns. This article considers the reasons that GIS is not used more, including longstanding ambivalence about quantitative methods and limited training opportunities. It then outlines ways in which GIS can uniquely inform historical research—by emphasizing underlying spatial processes, making spatial patterns visible, and transforming mapping into a process—in ways that can refine and challenge existing urban historical narratives. Finally, recommendations for overcoming existing barriers to historical GIS are presented.

Residential Segregation in the Industrializing City: A Closer Look

This article maps and measures several dimensions of residential segregation in Montreal in 1881, thereby adding to our understanding of the social structure of the industrial city. Taking advantage of an unusual historical database—a historical geographic information system (H-GIS)—we locate 17,000 individual households with precision, and evaluate the "dissimilarity" of neighborhoods along several social dimensions and at various levels of spatial aggregation. The empirical findings suggest that Montreal was highly segregated along lines of ethnic identity as well as socioeconomic status; segregation values increased inversely with size of the spatial unit, but precision of unit boundaries have negligible effect. Coupling the highprecision GIS with a statistical model such as the classic index of dissimilarity lends new power to grasp the scale of phenomena, to inquire into behavioral choices of 19th-century households, and even to challenge our assumptions about the meaning of "segregation" or "integration."

National Historical Geographical Information System as a tool for historical research: Population and railways in Wales, 1841–1911

One of the early drivers of historical GIS was the development of national historical GISs. These systems usually hold all of a country's census and related statistics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such they have represent an extremely valuable resource, but at the same time they were and remain extremely expensive and time consuming to build. Was the investment worthwhile? This paper takes one of these systems, the Great Britain Historical GIS, and explores how it was built, what methodologies were developed to exploit the data that it contains, and provides an example to demonstrate how it made possible a unique analysis of railroads in Wales before the First World War.

‘Buried Beneath the Waves’: Using GIS to Examine the Physical and Social Impact of a Historical Flood

Natural disasters such as floods can periodically disturb and destroy the built and social fabric of communities. Despite their importance, specific ramifications of natural disasters can be overlooked in local histories due to a paucity of data. In this article we bring together several disparate sources of data within a historical geographic information system (HGIS) to study certain physical and social details of the flood which devastated the Town of London West, Canada on 11 July 1883. The integration of historical and contemporary data sources allow for the construction of a three-dimensional model of where the flood likely occurred. With the location of the flood determined, it is possible to discern which residents were impacted and the legacy of the disaster on the community. This study demonstrates how digital technologies such as GIS can help provide a richer understanding of urban and environmental history.

Historical GIS and Visualization

Historic hotel guest registers are used to extract data to map and analyze visitation patterns for commercial hotels in three small places in Central Pennsylvania during the late 19th century. In an era before the automobile, guestsheds reflect both the slow travel of the horse and wagon era and linkages via railroad networks to more distant places. Hotel registers in places off a railroad line generate different guestsheds than those on rail lines; those in county seats often show the influence of seasonal court sessions and county fairs. Although the application of a geographic information system (GIS) is useful for teasing out spatial variations in the data, temporal patterns are not so easily distinguished. This research reports on the use of Hotelviz, an integrated software for visual data analysis, to help confront the complex spatiotemporal trends that are to be found in the data.

Metropolitan Telecommunication

Although the United Kingdom has long lost its position at the heart of a practically global empire, the British capital London still continues to stand at the very center of a global telecommunication and information network. Yet, global connectivity is not evenly distributed throughout the metropolis. As recent studies show, information-dependent businesses tend to concentrate in particular quarters in and around the City of London and the West End despite the spatial flexibility that modern telecommunication technology allows for. This study seeks to demonstrate how the modern ``digital divide'' that rips through London continuously evolved from similarly uneven connectivity patterns in the telegraphic network of late 19th-century London. With the help of historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS), these patterns will be visualized. This examination will show how important a role continuity played in the evolution of modern informational patterns and how this sheds new light on issues of technological dynamism and agency.

From Wilderness to Megalopolis

Using a historical Geographic Information System (GIS) and statistical measures, this research examines the sex ratios of the United States between 1790 and 1910 to determine whether men truly outnumbered women on the American Frontier. We used United States Census data combined with historical digital county maps to calculate male-to-female sex ratios by county and settlement density class. We analyzed these ratios using descriptive statistics, the Games-Howell analysis of variance (ANOVA) test, and comparisons of historical GIS maps. We found that gender ratios on the American Frontier were extremely high throughout the study period and were significantly different from those in more densely populated areas. In addition, sex ratios declined as population density increased in each decade of this study. However, frontier areas still had fairly high gender ratios in 1910, thus showing ongoing significant demographic differences between those sparsely settled counties and more urbanized regions.

Different Places, Different Stories: Infant Mortality Decline in England and Wales, 1851–1911

This article presents a substantive analysis using the Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GIS), one of the earliest national historical GISs. It develops exploratory techniques to explore local patterns of demographic change and applies these to the study of infant mortality in England and Wales from 1851 to 1911. The techniques developed could be applied to a wide variety of fields where the aim is to explore long-term spatio-temporal change using data published for administrative units that are affected by boundary changes. The Victorian and Edwardian eras saw the origins of the sustained infant mortality decline that characterized the entire twentieth century. Although the period has been extensively studied for a century and more, our knowledge of this vital phase is still surprisingly limited. In particular, much of the research to date has focused on urban areas and has thus stressed urban explanations as to why infant mortality began to decline. Because this article uses a comprehensive GIS database, we are able to challenge some of the orthodoxies that have emerged. It reveals that patterns of infant mortality decline in different parts of the country were more complex than has previously been described. Far from the national rate being driven by changes in urban areas, the largest declines and earliest declines in infant mortality were found in rural parts of the southeast of England, as the rural periphery lagged far behind. Urban areas were slow to decline due to the specific conditions that existed in them in this period.

Historical GIS: structuring, mapping and analysing geographies of the past

The last 10 years have seen a sudden rise in interest in the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in historical research. This has led to a field that has become known as `historical GIS'. This development started in the more quantitative ends of the discipline but has spread to encompass qualitative research as well. Interest in historical GIS is not restricted to researchers who would previously have regarded themselves as historical geographers, but has in fact led to an increased awareness of the importance of geography from across the discipline of history. This paper introduces historical GIS and critically evaluates how it is affecting the practice of historical geography.

The New Geographical History: A Reply to Bol

AbstractThis response by Peter Bol to my earlier article ‘Manchu Empire or China Historical GIS?’ presents a welcome admission of the China Historical Geographic Information System’s Sinocentric depiction of Inner Asian polities not part of China during the Qing period, though at times loosely included in a greater Chinese empire or claimed by Manchu rulers.With this clarification, I thank Bol for his forthrightness. Bol’s subsequent critique of my article as promoting historical GIS only where detailed historical maps and boundaries are available is, however, a misunderstanding of the central point of my argument.