Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the agenda. Most humanities academics wanting to use GIS would like
software that is affordable, is relatively easy to use, does the basic opera-
tions well, and provides all of the required functionality. Regretably,
such software does not exist.
15
At one end of the market are the major
commercial GIS software packages such as ArcGIS that offer a wide and
sophisticated suite of tools.
16
If these packages are not available through
a site license, they can be prohibitively expensive, and even if they are
available, they often have a long learning curve associated with them.
At the other end are packages such as Google Earth, which is free and
very easy to use but provides such limited functionality that it cannot
be classed as full GIS software.17
17
In between these extremes there is
very litle available. One possible solution to this is that open source GIS
software packages are reaching maturity; a good example is Quantum
GIS.
18
These open source packages are free but arguably harder to use
than commercial packages, and they provide less functionality, although
they do the basic GIS operations. One possible further advantage of open
source software packages is that their functionality can be extended by
programmers, thus providing the potential for functionality to be devel-
oped specifically for the requirements of the humanities.
An alternative approach to using and adapting existing software
would be to develop a custom writen sotware package or packages spe-
cifically for humanities GIS purposes. This must be approached with cau-
tion and realism, as solutions like this tend to require large amounts of
resources, have long lead times, are highly dependent on a small number
of individuals (usually one key person), and rarely achieve as much user
acceptance as they perhaps deserve. Within the HGIS sphere the Great
American History Machine and the
Time
Map project both provide ex-
amples of potentially excellent products that never really achieved their
potential at least in part because of the difficulties of going from good
software to a package widely accepted by users.
19
This problem has af-
fected not only the GIS community but also other fields within history
and computing.
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A more practical solution to the difficulties of using GIS software is
to provide beter training in existing sotware tools available to humani-
ties scholars. Ideally this training would be included in postgraduate
courses; however, at present the demand is probably too limited within
