Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship

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Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship offers the latest in practical use and theoretical issues in the emerging fi eld of geographic information system (GIS) technology, provides visually enticing case studies that offer new insights to a range of historical events, and will prove interesting to readers, from historical scholars to history buffs and GIS users.

In the last decade, historical GIS has emerged as a promising new way to study the past. Historical GIS is the use of geographic information system software and allied geospatial methods for historical research and teaching. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship offers case studies and essays on key issues involving historical GIS, highlighting the unprecedented range of tools to visualize historical information in a geographic context. Quantitative social science historians are embracing GIS to facilitate the mapping of large datasets, but anyone with access to the software and the skills to use it can include mapping in research. This change is little short of revolutionary considering how few scholars or students made maps even 10 years ago. Historical maps are suddenly in great demand as digitally modified, georeferenced images that enable researchers to study GIS as a visual medium of communication and analysis.

Anne Kelly Knowles is a historical geographer who teaches at Middlebury College. Amy Hillier teaches courses on the application of GIS in city planning, urban studies, and social work at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Her research has focused on GIS applications in redlining and housing discrimination, affordable housing, and public health. Previously, Dr. Hillier was director of research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Cartographic Modeling Lab.