Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
is a particularly exciting one and one where HGIS has much to offer to
the wider GISc community, where qualitative GIS is still in a relatively
early stage of development.
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Within the humanities, quantitative history
is - and is likely to remain - a relatively small field; thus, if GIS is only
able to handle quantitative data, its impact will be limited. If, on the
other hand, GIS is able to cope with qualitative sources, then not only
will it become applicable to a much wider range of fields within histori-
cal research, but it will also become usable across many other subjects
within the humanities - potentially in any humanities discipline where
geography is seen as relevant. These disciplines could include - but are
not limited to - literary studies, linguistics, classics, religious studies,
media studies, and the performing arts. They could also include the more
cultural areas within human geography that have traditionally been hos-
tile to GIS because of its quantitative nature.
Many challenges remain in making progress with qualitative sources,
but solutions seem achievable, and rapid progress can be expected. The
first challenge is simply to create effective spatial databases of qualitative
sources. he development of atribute data in a range of nontraditional
formats such as still images, movies, and sound will definitely continue
within and beyond GIS. Georeferencing these collections is clearly a
major challenge, and it is here that the development of appropriate in-
frastructures may have a large role to play. Most qualitative sources can
be satisfactorily georeferenced to point locations. It is much quicker and
easier to develop a list of place-names with their associated point coordi-
nates than it is to develop the large databases of changing administrative
boundaries required for many quantitative sources. Lists in this form are
the simplest type of gazeteer, and many of these currently exist, with
some of them, such as Geonames, being freely available.
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Developing,
extending, and disseminating these resources has the potential to pay
handsome dividends for humanities GIS, as they have the potential to
allow us to georeference any source that has place-names and can sensi-
bly be represented in point form. Assuming that the place-names in the
source match the gazeteer versions reasonably well, this process is quick
and easy. Gazeteers include place-names, but they should also be able to
deal with more complex issues such as spelling variations, disambiguat-
ing different places with the same name, multilingual issues, and so on.
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