Historical GIS

Playing with a 1953 land survey map and 2019 Google Earth.

I love the chutzpah of Anne Kelly Knowles’s first two lines of her opening essay, “GIS and History” of Placing History. “This book argues that scholars’ use of geographic information systems (GIS) is changing the practice of history. Time will tell whether the argument is prophetic or premature.” The implication is that there is no question of the argument’s truth, only the timeline of it—GIS will change the practice of history. Fortunately, her bravado is well-grounded (pun intended): the book proceeds to demonstrate several non-trivial ways that GIS had already been the primary tool for historical enquiry for many established historians—a demographic anti-futurist almost by definition. So what is historical GIS?

Knowles identifies four key characteristics, which may be summarized as 1) geography significantly driving the history, 2) geography forming a significant part of the historical evidence, 3) the use of a geo-chronological database, and 4) the presentation of maps as part of the historian’s argument. What Placing History needs to show to prove its central argument is that the use of geography for enquiry, evidence, and argument does not merely deepen existing understandings based on the traditional textual sources; it needs to show that in some cases it has challenged existing narratives so compellingly that GIS history has changed the overall historiography for a topic. This it does, but first let’s examine the pedagogical values of GIS.

The late Robert Churchill identifies four “distinct benefits”: 1) the inculcation of “analytical and problem-solving strategies,” 2) the demonstration of the value of the “visualization,” 3) engagement with “social, economic, and political issues,” (he cites the Gulf War, indigenous land claims, personal privacy questions, redlining, and gerrymandering) and 4) an interdisciplinary bridge. The first two points are more compelling to me personally, but his arguments are all valid. Amy Hillier then grabs the baton and argues more practically for all the ways that historical GIS reaches “a technology-savvy generation,” as well as some valuable advice concerning praxis. The use of the 1896 social class maps of W.E.B. Dubois provide a powerful example of the power of GIS in a somewhat counter-intuitive way: Dubois recognized the power of spatial illustration so clearly that he took months of innumerable labor hours to produce what GIS can now reproduce in a fraction of the time.

So aside from teaching history, what is the impact of GIS on history itself? Frankly, I’m amazed by how much it had already done at the time of the publication of Placing History, some 15 years ago. The nature of empire when communication traveled at the speed of a horse (not even wearing a saddle) has been the subject of much historical enquiry going at least as far back as Edward Gibbon. With Richard Taibert and Tom Elliot’s GIS-powered analysis and manipulation of the medieval Peutinger map, our understanding is deepening. This almost inverts Walter Benjamin’s powerful point about the lost of auras in the age of mechanical reproduction—with digital reproduction, I feel closer to the lives of the roughly 50 million citizens, slaves, and subjects of the Roman Empire. Peter K. Bol’s work did much the same for imperial China, as well as stretching my understanding of how insignificant a boundary might have been, even to a provincial governor. What does all this imply for history? I think as we become more comfortable leaning on geographic data as evidence the idea of visualizations as distractions from historical narrative will diminish, and the history will be stronger. No less significantly, historians will begin to appreciate more and more just how profound the old cliché that the map is not the territory really is—when you think about it, the are few things more breathtakingly oversimplifying than a smooth boundary line.

Historical scholarship will not abandon their bias for the written record anytime soon, and I’m inclined to think that’s a good thing. However, maps, spatial data, and GIS are all on the rise, both leading up to Placing History and continuing since. I have long believed that the curious historical relationship between space and time has been under-examined and under-utilized. Speaking extremely broadly, since the rise of the recording industry, popular music seems to entail in some cases a lag of decades from urban centers to least populated areas. When my sister and her husband arrived in the remote village of Kapchorwa, Uganda in 2005, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers were extremely popular there—more than two decades after their peak popularity in the United states. That is an extremely trivial example, but tracking the movement of more catalyzing culture such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, labor union songs, or private schools since 1954. I think the key will be harnessing movement and sound in the representation of data. This will necessitate historical scholarship not being confined to the physical codex, but to a great extent we’re already there.