Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
York: Guildford Press, 1995) was the irst atempt to critically explore
GIS and caused a considerable controversy at the time. Many of the views
expressed in this volume have since moderated, in part as a consequence
of the GIS community responding to them, as essays by some of the same
authors in Longley et al.,
Geographical Information Systems
illustrate.
Time in GIS
A major issue that GIS is frequently criticized for is its perceived poor
handling of time, something that is regarded as particularly important
for historical applications. The mainstream GIS community has been
exploring the issue of time for many years. One of the earliest topics in
this field that still expresses the issues well is G. Langran's
Time in Geo-
graphical Information Systems
(London: Taylor & Francis, 1992). Slightly
more recently, D. J. Peuquet's
Representations of Space and Time
(New
York: Guildford, 2002) presents an update of how the field has (and has
not) developed over the ensuing ten years. The same author also has a
chapter in Longley et al.,
Geographical Information Systems
that summa-
rizes many of these themes.
Chapter 6 of Gregory and Ell,
Historical GIS,
discusses the relevance
of time in GIS to historical GIS. One area that is particularly relevant here
is the use of “areal interpolation” techniques, which allow data collected
using different sets of boundaries, such as those at different dates, to be
compared. I. N. Gregory and P. S. Ell's “Breaking the Boundaries: Inte-
grating 200 Years of the Census Using GIS,”
Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society, Series A
168 (2005): 419-37, and “Error Sensitive Historical GIS:
Identifying Areal Interpolation Errors in Time Series Data,”
International
Journal of Geographical Information Science
20 (2006): 135-52 describe
this application. Their paper “Analysing Spatio-temporal Change Us-
ing National Historical GISs: Population Change during and after the
Great Irish Famine,”
Historical Methods
38 (2005): 149-67 provides an ap-
plied example of this approach. Alternative examples of approaches that
exploit time in historical GIS, this time to explore complex temporal pat-
terns in point data, are provided by D. A. Fyfe, D. W. Holdsworth, and
C. Weaver, “Historical GIS and Visualization: Insights from Three Hotel
Registers in Central Pennsylvania, 1888-1897,”
Social Science Computer
