Overview
- Discusses GIS for history from a non-technical viewpoint
- Brings together different schools of scholarship
- Closes a gap in the scholarly landscape
- Introducing an intellectual debate about technology in the humanities
- Showcases selected case studies of GIS-History-Humanities applications
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Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
“Mainstream” history, however, seems to be rather unaffected by this trend. More generally speaking: Why is it that computer applications in general have failed to make much headway in history departments, despite the first steps being undertaken a good forty years ago?
With the “spatial turn” in full swing in the humanities, and many historians dealing with spatial and geographical questions, one would think GIS would be welcomed with open arms. Yet there seems to be no general anticipation by historians of employing GIS as a research tool. As mentioned, HGIS are popular chiefly among Historical Geographers and Social and Economic Historians. The latter disciplines seem to be predestined to use such software through the widespread quantitativemethodology these disciplines have employed traditionally. Other historical sub-disciplines, such as Ancient History, are also very open to this emerging technology since the scarcity of written sources in this field can be mitigated by inferences made from an HGIS that has archaeological data stored in it, for example. In most of Modern History, however, the use of GIS is rarely seen. The intellectual benefit that a GIS may bring about seems not be apparent to scholars from this sub-discipline (and others).
This book wants to investigate and discuss this controversy. Why does the wider historian community not embrace GIS more readily? While one cannot deny that the methodologies linked with a GIS follow geographical paradigms rather than historical ones, the potential of GIS as a 'killer application' for digital historical scholarship should be obvious.
This book brings together authors from Geography and History to discuss the value of GIS for historical research. The focus, however, will not be on the "how", but on the "why" of GIS in history.
Reviews
“This book is a collection of debates, opinions, experiences, and reservations along with some case studies. The former are a rich source of ideas for those interested in the differences between the geographer’s and the historian’s craft and concerned with the role of technology as enabling or disabling research.” (Mary Kelly, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 48, 2015)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Dr. Alexander von Lünen is a Geography Research Fellow at the University of Portmouth, Hampsire, UK. His principle research interests are digital humanities / historical informatics, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and history, history of diving, history of aerospace medicine and physiology.
Dr. Charles Travis was awarded a PhD in Historical-Cultural Geography from Trinity College Dublin in 2006. He is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Trinity Long Room Hub. His research concerns the historical, cultural and environmental geographies of early twentieth century Ireland; the development of Humanities GIS methodologies and applications, as well as media geographies.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: History and GIS
Book Subtitle: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections
Editors: Alexander Lünen, Charles Travis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5009-8
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental Science, Earth and Environmental Science (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-007-5008-1Published: 05 December 2012
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-007-9829-8Published: 29 January 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-94-007-5009-8Published: 05 December 2012
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 242
Topics: Geographical Information Systems/Cartography, History, general, Regional/Spatial Science, Philosophy of Science