Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
torical Methods
36 (2003): 41-51; and A. Kunz, “Fusing Time and Space:
The Historical Information System
HGIS Germany,
”
International Jour-
nal of Humanities and Arts Computing
1 (2007): 111-22. hese systems
are primarily polygon based and designed to hold census and related
data for the past two centuries or so. An alternative approach, based on
over a millennium of Chinese data represented using point locations, is
provided by M. L. Berman, “Boundaries or Networks in Historical GIS:
Concepts of Measuring Space and Administrative Geography in Chinese
H istor y,”
Historical Geography
33 (2005): 118-33; and P. K. Bol, “Creating
a GIS for the History of China,” in Knowles,
Placing History,
27-60. A. K.
Knowles, ed., “Reports on National Historical GIS Projects,”
Historical
Geography
33 (2005): 293-314 provides concise summaries of these and
other systems. One issue that is usually not well handled in historical
GIS databases that represent administrative boundaries is uncertainty in
the locations of these boundaries. B. Plewe, “The Nature of Uncertainty
in Historical Geographical Information,”
Transactions in GIS
6 (2 0 0 2):
431-56 describes a solution to this.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that place-name gazeteers, basi-
cally database tables that provide coordinate locations for place-names,
are an effective way of rapidly georeferencing large amounts of historical
material. R. Mostern and I. Johnson, “From Named Place to Naming
Event: Creating Gazeteers for History,”
International Journal of Geo-
graphical Information Science
22 (2008): 1091-1108; R. Mostern, “Histori-
cal Gazeteers: An Experiential Perspective, with Examples from Chi-
nese History,”
Historical Methods
21 (2008): 39-46; and H. R. Southall,
R. Mostern, and M. Berman, “On Historical Gazeteers,”
International
Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing
5 (2011): 127-45 provide three
accounts of this. hese build on earlier perspectives when gazeteers
were seen more as a way of adding metadata for digital libraries. See,
for example, L. L. Hill, “Guest Editorial: Georeferencing in Digital Li-
braries,”
D-Lib Magazine
10, no. 5 (2004) and other essays in this issue
(htp://www.dlib.org/dlib/may04/05contents.html).
Historical GIS on the Internet
There are a wealth of sites that place historical GIS resources on the
Internet (the Historical GIS Research Network, htp://www.hgis.org
