Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
eight
Further Reading: From Historical
GIS to Spatial Humanities:
An Evolving Literature
Ian N. Gr egory
As was stated in the introduction, the use of GIS to
study the past has evolved rapidly over the last decade or so, and we
now stand at a position where the field is becoming both deeper and
broader. As the field develops, so too does the literature, which has be-
come increasingly voluminous but also increasingly disparate, making it
difficult to keep track of developments in the field and to see what other
researchers working on different topics but with similar challenges are
doing. his chapter atempts to summarize this literature. It starts with
publications that provide an overview of the field, moves on to databases
and methods, and then turns to applied research before finishing by in-
troducing the emerging fields of humanities GIS and spatial humanities.
The chapter describes the current literature. It is not meant to be fully
comprehensive and does not include earlier chapters in this topic unless
completely necessary. It also only includes conventional academic pub-
lications, thus ignoring web resources (other than articles in electronic
journals), of which there are many. For a more comprehensive list of
publications and a list of web resources, see the Historical GIS Research
Network website (htp://www.hgis.org.uk). Suggestions for updates to
this site are always welcome.
Although there were a few papers writen on HGIS in the 1990s, the
growing momentum and maturity of the field was marked by a special
edition of
Social Science History
(vol. 24, no. 3), published in 2000 and
edited by A. K. Knowles. Since then, this literature has grown rapidly
and now includes a signiicant number of topics from high quality uni-
versity presses and articles in many of the leading journals. Many of the
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