Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and people from beyond the academy in fields such as the commercial
and heritage sectors?
The three chapters are based on projects that have contrasts as well
as similarities. The biggest contrasts perhaps lie in the size of the projects
and the stages they are at. Humphrey Southall has been working on the
system that is at the center of his essay for nearly two decades, and it
has received extensive funding from a large number of sources for many
different purposes. Julia Hallam and Les Roberts lie at the opposite ex-
treme, with much of their work being based on a single focused two-year
project. Elijah Meeks and Ruth Mostern lie between these two.
Four areas of similarity can be identified from the essays: the chal-
lenge of incorporating historical sources that are not easily represented
into a GIS using the quantitative atribute data linked to points, lines, or
polygons; using GIS to conduct academic studies in areas beyond tradi-
tional social science history; going further than this to use the technol-
ogy to present results to users beyond the academy; and the problems of
sustaining and enhancing major infrastructural resources.
The first of these issues suggests the wide range of potential sources
that researchers increasingly want to incorporate into a GIS framework
that the original GIS data model is not well suited to handling. In the
cases of both Southall and Meeks and Mostern the most important of
these is place-names and the coordinates of the locations that the names
refer to. W hile these can easily be represented as points or polygons,
difficulties arise once additional information such as which higher-level
administrations or jurisdictions the place-names belonged to at different
dates also need to be added. Changes over time add further complica-
tions. In both cases the authors have had to develop complex relational
database structures to cope with these challenges. Southall additionally
points out that environmental historical data tend to be in raster form,
and he explores how these types of sources can be integrated with more
traditional HGIS sources. Hallam and Roberts have a somewhat different
challenge in that their material consists of historical amateur movies.
Their challenge is to use such a qualitative and unconventional source
of atribute data within a technology that was designed to represent and
analyze quantitative material.
