Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
been highly successful in disseminating their material far more widely
to audiences that include journalists, politicians and other decision mak-
ers, businesspeople, genealogists, heritage professionals, and the general
public. These groups have a wide range of interests in GIS-based materi-
als, including subjects associated with their local area; topics relevant to
an area that they have visited; place-specific events, culture, literature,
and heritage and their legacies (which include liabilities, pollution, and
subsidence as well as more positive themes); and national and regional
trends such as segregation that have a geographical component. To date,
most of these projects have been largely driven by the opportunities
that academics have spoted, but there is clearly the potential to work in
partnership on these types of products.
Nonacademic sectors also have much to offer to the academic com-
munity. Many people and organizations from outside the academic
sector are generating georeferenced data - or data that could usefully
be georeferenced - for a wide range of purposes. These vary from user-
generated content on sites such as Flickr to data from museum, library,
and archive catalogs.
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There is enormous potential to use these types of
resources in ways that benefit both sectors, as they can provide inputs
for academic study, and academics can repurpose and present them in
new ways that will benefit other audiences.
Conclusions
Historical GIS, humanities GIS, spatial history, and spatial humanities
are four terms that put a different emphasis on an evolving field that
started with a very quantitative approach to history but has evolved to
have the potential to cover many aspects of digital research into the
geographies of the past. There are still challenges to be overcome, but
the field is reaching maturity, especially in the more quantitative side,
although the qualitative is catching up fast. The field is highly interdis-
ciplinary, covering not only many different topics in history but also
different disciplines within the humanities and technical fields such as
GISc and digital humanities. This interdisciplinarity is a strength, but it
does raise challenges, as the researcher has to have expertise in GIS and
