Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
early papers, such as most of those in the 2000 volume of
Social Science
History,
talked about the construction of databases and the potential that
these systems would have once they were completed. By the mid-2000s
significant works of applied scholarship started to appear in many fields,
with urban history, environmental history, historical demography, and
medieval history being particularly rich seams. As was discussed in the
introduction, two trends are apparent. First, it is becoming increasingly
common to talk of spatial history rather than historical GIS, reflecting a
move from a technological focus to the applied. Second, from its origins
in social science history, the use of GIS is spreading across the discipline
and into new humanities subjects. At present its use in these disciplines
is perhaps where it was in history several years ago, with the emphasis
more on creating databases and their potential for scholarship rather
than on finished articles. Nevertheless, this is clearly a rapidly develop-
ing and exciting growth area that is often referred to as humanities GIS
or spatial humanities.
Histor ical GIS
Perhaps the irst topic that could be called a historical GIS topic, al-
though it predates the term by some years, is M. Goerke, ed.,
Coordinates
for Historical Maps
(St. Katharinen: Max-Planck Institut für Geschichte,
1994); however, this is really only of interest as it illustrates just how far
the field has developed. After the 2000 volume of
Social Science History,
three publications appeared in quick succession that further defined
the field. I. N. Gregory,
A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in His-
torical Research
(Oxford: Oxbow, 2003) outlined what GIS had to offer
to historians at a technical level (see htp://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods
/publications/ig-gis.pdf). A. K. Knowles,
Past Time, Past Place: GIS for
History
(Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press, 2002) and a special edition of
History and Computing
(vol. 13, no. 1 [2001]), edited by P. S. Ell and I. N.
Gregory, presented collections of essays on the state of the field at that
time. Edited volumes have continued to be produced at an increasing
pace, with the work that they contain developing considerably. A special
edition of
Historical Geography
(vol. 33) appeared in 2005, and
Placing
History: How GIS Is Changing Historical Scholarship
was published in
