Historical GIS

"Few landscapes change more rapid than the marine. Sandbanks, channels and even complete coastlines can change dramatically overnight. This is a threat not only for modern mariners, our seafaring forefathers knew this problem also all too well. With modern techniques we can monitor these changes and adapt our maps on a regular basis. These techniques not only provide saver shipping, they can also be used to find the wreck of unfortunate former mariners. How can this method be used to predict where wrecks can be found. And, if a wreck is found, is it possible to preserve it?
In order to get a full picture of possible wreck sites, we need to know what the underwater landscape was in various periods, and how it has changed over time.
Historic Cartographical analysis can give and insight in the use and sometimes in the morphology of former landscapes. The problem with this is that it only provides qualitative information; i.e. descriptive data (map legends, interpretations, names or remarks). Modern remote-sensing devices give purely quantitative data. In order to model changes in landscape overtime, the historical qualitative data should be in some way ‘quantified’ to make calculations possible. If the historical records provide quantitative data as well, they should somehow be extrapolated to be comparable with modern high resolution data. This ‘quantifying’ of data can also be used for modern qualitative maps, such as soil type maps or land use maps.
This way historical data can be integrated with modern remote-sensing and survey techniques."

The Spanish conquistadores' capture of the Inka emperor, Atawallpa, and massacre of many of his people in Cajamarca on November 16, 1532, was a tremendously consequential event. How does our view of such an event change, however, when viewed at a distance and from different places? Relying on Indigenous testimony, this article threads together the stories and actions of provincial folk, Andean lords, female intermediaries, fugitive Inka royalty, runner-messengers, porters, and slaves maneuvering beyond Caja-marca during this chaotic and confusing time. Reconstructing and mapping their activity demonstrates how Andean diplomacy, mobility, politics, and history made the conquistadores' survival in Cajamarca-and subsequent advance to Cuzco-possible. It also presents glimpses into how and why Andeans made the decisions they did and serves as a useful reminder that, to these actors in 1532 and 1533, nothing was inevitable. Cajamarca, November 1532 T he Sapa Inka, or peerless ruler, set out from the royal baths of Qonoq for Cajamarca on November 16, 1532. Atawallpa, the leader of the largest Indigenous empire in the Americas, traveled with such a large entourage that, when he arrived at the plaza of Cajamarca, some members of his procession had not yet left Qonoq, six kilometers behind. As the procession entered the plaza (see figure 1), Francisco Pizarro and some 167 compatriots waited in hiding in adjacent buildings. Friar Vicente de Valverde emerged from one of the buildings and approached the emperor. Eyewitness accounts differ about what happened next. The picture presented by the scribe Francisco de Xerez and other Spanish witnesses is one of a devastating yet carefully orchestrated attack.

Nowadays, daily life intensively depends on public services. Increasing population and urbanization take humans away from environment which may lead to chaos in usage of city lands. Consequently, human is in trouble using public services and facilities including green spaces. Isfahan, one of the metropolitans, has 18 m2 green spaces per person while City Park of district 8 is of inappropriate distribution with regard to population density. To create a localization map of civil park, Isfahan district 8 has been selected. The selected district delimits to Baharestan in north and to Kaveh street in west and to Shahid Forouqi in south and to Emam Komeini street in west-south. Finally, GIS has been used to create given layers and calculate weights based on AHP. According to overlap between layers, the most appropriate places have been identified.

This is the revised users' guide for the Microsoft Access version of the China Biographical Database, a relational database of over 300,000 historical figures, their kinship, associations, office-holding, etc.  It has features that are not yet part of the current release.  The new release is coming soon.

This short article summarises a preliminary study of the poetry and correspondence of the English poet Norman Nicholson (1914-1987), undertaken as part of Lancaster University's Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places project. In addition to offering a concise explanation of the Spatial Humanities project and the methods it employs, the article explains how working with GIS, visualisation techniques, and distant reading enriches our understanding both of the geography of Nicholson's poetry and of the spatial dimensions of the network of people with whom he exchanged letters throughout his career.

During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including the so-called " Historical GIS " , 3D GIS heritage and its subcategory of " SDI for cultural heritage ". Specific literature reviews, gathering and analysing the scientific production for Culture Heritage and GIS based research questions, are currently lacking. Therefore, the overall goal of this article is to provide an objective summary of the current state-of-the-art concerning how GIS has been used and what methods and analysis have been applied in the field of cultural heritage. In this sense, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the literature on the application of GIS in cultural heritage is carried out. To do so, the WOS and Scopus databases were considered. The results show that the dominant application of GIS is in the realisation of inventory and cataloguing of archaeological and architectural heritage. As a result of the quantitative analysis, we also verify the principal sources in which most studies have been published, highlighting the "ISPRS Archives" with 14 publications, the "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" with 9, and "Proceedings of Digital Heritage" with 6 publications. These data show that the sources that most publis h mainly belong to the field of IT and Computer Science. In addition, the SLR shows that in the last three years there has been a greater tendency to use GIS to solve more specific problems of heritage through its use in conjunction with other tools such as BIM and photogrammetry.

The first open public heritage inventory project in Croatia (and probably beyond), was started as a collaboration between non-governmental organization Dragodid.org and experts from Croatian heritage and geo-information scene. Its aim is to explore the Croatian dry-stone heritage using digital technologies and participation of local enthusiasts, tourists and others. Contributions are possible through Internet browser and Android mobile application.

This report shows how it is possible to collate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data for historic settlement nucleation and dispersion with a range of data on environmental variables in order to investigate the relationships between them. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model specification, selection and validation procedures, followed by further analysis using spatial regression methods, identified environmental variables that appear to have had the most significant influence on settlement organisation. The use of OLS and spatial regression and the innovative Relative Area Overlap (RAO) technique has enabled investigation of how relationships between key environmental variables and historic settlement organisation varied across England. Overall, the regression analyses indicate that far more of the variation in the measures of settlement organisation is not explained by the environmental variables than is explained by them. The results of the RAO analysis echo this conclusion. Using unsupervised classification, it has been possible to develop new, national-scale characterisations of historic settlement organisation and of key environmental variables. These new classifications of historic settlement organisation often broadly align with Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell’s delineations of provinces, sub-provinces and local regions, but the cluster outlines and Roberts and Wrathmell’s boundaries diverge more often than they agree.

Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a cloud centered platform for temporal and spatial geoprocessing and analysis on global challenges that require more computation power and involve large geospatial datasets. In GEE, the user analyses are automatically parallelized to make use of the computers housed in Google data centers. Moreover, GEE comes with a massive data catalog of 40 years of historical and current remotely sensed imageries (e.g., MODIS, Landsat) and other data. This data archive is constantly updated with the acquisition of new images. GEE also allows users to do spatial and temporal analyses based on their own data (e.g., vector, raster) that are exported into GEE data catalog. The exported data can be kept private or made available for other users of GEE.

To facilitate the users, such as academicians and scientists, and to script more complex analysis, the functionality of GEE is exposed through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for JavaScript and Python.

Dawne mapy topograficzne stanowią znakomite źródło informacji o przestrzeni geograficznej z przeszłości. Rozwój systemów informacji geograficznej i ich zastosowanie w badaniach geograficzno-historycznych zdecydowanie ułatwił przeprowadzanie analiz z wykorzystaniem dawnych map topograficznych i otworzył szereg nowych możliwości – szczególnie w zakresie analiz ilościowych. Niestety pozorna łatwość wykorzystania GIS w wielu wypadkach wpłynęła negatywnie na jakość przeprowadzanych badań. Wykorzystanie dawnych map topograficznych do przeprowadzania analiz zmienności przestrzeni geograficznej wymaga położenia szczególnego nacisku na metodyczne aspekty badania: dobór odpowiednich materiałów kartograficznych, ujednolicenie podstaw matematycznych, właściwą interpretację treści dawnych map topograficznych. Najlepsze rezultaty powstają w wyniku połączenia przeszłości i nowoczesności.

La problématique générale visait à préciser l’évolution des relations entre l’homme et la rivière à l’échelle du bassin versant de l’Orgeval (Seine-et-Marne), archéologie rurale dans une microrégion déterminée par ses limites géographiques pouvant receler de sites multiples témoignant d’activités humaines sur l’eau ou contigüe (pisciculture, meunerie, ponts et gués, canalisation, etc.). La découverte de ces sites par l’étude documentaire a orienté en partie le travail de terrain, afin de donner une idée de l’exploitation des cours d’eau par leur implantation, répartition et développement. Les objectifs de la prospection au sol aspiraient à vérifier certaines hypothèses issues du croisement des données, la confirmation de l’existence ou de l’absence de sites d’étangs et à déterminer des gisements qu’aucune source documentaire ne permettait d’appréhender.
Pour procéder à cette démarche scientifique et actualiser la connaissance des données par la prospection pédestre, le cheminement a été établi, d’une part, en se polarisant sur le fond de vallée, le long des berges contigües au cours d’eau actuel, prétendant à la connaissance des aménagements hydrauliques identifiés et non identifiés, d’autre part, en tenant compte des antiques cours d’eau représentés sur les cartes anciennes. Ainsi, des strates ou zones privilégiées, par petites unités ont été déterminées.
La localisation de structures, barrant un cours d’eau, a été préalablement envisageable par l’examen des cartes anciennes. Les indices topographiques sont toujours lisibles sur le terrain. Les digues dominent couramment le paysage actuel. Les principaux résultats dans ce rapport sont l’identification d’étangs, de digues, d’un gué et d’un relief sculpté.

The general problematic aimed at clarifying the evolution of the relations between the man and the river on the scale of the Orgeval (Seine-et-Marne), rural archeology in a microregion determined by its geographical limits which could conceal multiple sites testifying to human activities on the water or contiguous. The discovery of these sites by the archives study guided part of the field work, in order to give an idea of ​​the exploitation of the rivers by their implantation, distribution and development. The objectives of the prospecting on the ground aspired to verify certain hypotheses resulting from the crossing of the data, the confirmation of the existence or the absence of sites of ponds and to determine deposits that no documentary source made it possible to apprehend.
The location of structures, barring a watercourse, was previously possible through the examination of old maps. Topographic indices are always legible in the field. Dykes commonly dominate the current landscape. The main results in this report are the identification of ponds, dikes, a ford and a carved relief.

Nowadays, daily life intensively depends on public services. Increasing population and urbanization take humans away from environment which may lead to chaos in usage of city lands. Consequently, human is in trouble using public services and facilities including green spaces. Isfahan, one of the metropolitans, has 18 m2 green spaces per person while city park of district 8 is of inappropriate distribution with regard to population density. The current study is aimed to localize a suitable place for city park which focuses on such criteria as:  To be close to street  To be close to residential centers  To be far away from the existing parks  Tobe close to cultural and educational centers  To be close to parking lot Finally, GIS has been used to create given layers and calculate weights based on AHP. According to overlap between layers, the most appropriate places have been identified: 1. In Marchin district which is of the area of 16 m2 2. In Bariman district which is of the area of 29 m2 3. In Imam Komeini street which is of the area of 17 m2 4. In Jaber Ansari street which is of the area of 23 m2 Keywords: City Park, Geographical Information System (GIS), AHP, Localization, District 8 of Isfahan

This is a document I created as a companion to my presentation at the AHA 2017 on my use of ArcGIS Story Maps as assignments in history courses.  It especially focuses on how I created the project A History of the World in 40 Objects (http://arcg.is/2aFeT95) with my Honors World History class at Auburn University.  This file includes technical instructions, assignment templates, and a rubric.

In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune (Trice 2014), while discussing how modern Native Americans have become culturally invisible in the United States, indigenous rapper Frank Waln stated “we’re a people with a past, not of the past.” This is a process he calls “symbolic annihilation.” In many ways, the Gallina invert Waln’s sentence. They were a people of the past but without a past. By purposely removing objects that referenced their place-based past, they removed their recent history to focus more fully on the period of the distant past (Basketmaker II) that was their atavistic ideal. They simultaneously removed themselves from history while wrapping themselves in their own version of the past. For this chapter, then, to reverse the standard archaeological gaze and view the Gallina as active producers and not just recipients of history, I used geosocial networks and architectural patterning to explore potential patterns in the archaeological record through the lens of social movements. The case study was conducted at the community level. The community data were synthesized in a bottom-up, diachronic, and cross-regional inquiry into the use of space and use of markers of place within and between Gallina communities. Thus, the Gallina are viewed as part of a historical continuum instead of merely within a spatially restricted culture area. From this perspective, they become much more than a culturally impoverished group that was pushed into poor resource areas at the margins of more demographically dense, culturally rich groups. Instead, when the non-local ceramics found in some Gallina households are interpreted as remnants of largely forgotten inscribed memory, they become a people with varied histories who chose to reject the northern Southwest’s changing social landscape by systematically removing their place-based connections to that history and then reworking their political and ideological world.
By taking a diachronic and network perspective, the Gallina become a people who chose their way in their world. Specifically, they decided to step out of a cultural and ideological trajectory diametrically opposed to their ideas on how life should be organized. Once socially and historically situated, the Gallina highlands look more like a place of refuge for people who were rebelling against political and religious changes in the northern Southwest than an area populated by simple folk unable to keep pace with their rapidly changing neighbors. The Gallina region suddenly becomes a much more complicated place—a diverse collection of people dedicated to creating a new community at the edges of their previous world, one with clear material connections to antecedent regional groups (see Simpson 2016) but with new architectural and artifactual forms (i.e., tri-notched axes and pointed-bottom vessels). However, they are not a hybrid group like the colonial resistors Homi K. Bhabha (1994) was describing when he redefined hybridity. Instead, as a product of their atavistic movement, they become hybrids through time. By appropriating the past for their own intentions, they become rebels in their present—pioneers of a future history.

This study focuses on a very small area of land that forms part of the northern central business district of Perth in Western Australia. In investigating this microscale of human occupation, Geographical Information System (GIS) was a research tool to investigate traditional historical sources not commonly thought of by historians as spatial. Changes, hidden until rediscovered through the agency of GIS, showed that the northern part of the townscape was intimately defined and cast in response to its swampland topography.

« Consumption », a major concern of the late 19th century, was still a disease associated with misery in the collective imagination of the early 20th century. The present dissertation focuses on consumption in the Barcelonian social space of the 1930s: it seeks to circumscribe the multiple meanings of tuberculosis which emerge from medical discourse as well as from the patients’ experience.
The discovery of the Koch bacillus in 1882 entailed a redefinition of the fight against tuberculosis, as the bacillus came to be seen as the single cause of the disease. Since priority was given to the eradication of the contagious agent, tuberculosis was more than before associated with dust, unsanitary and crowded environments. From 1929 to 1936, the Catalan authorities in Barcelona concentrated on preventive action, which consisted in the extirpation of the Koch bacillus from housing in some areas that were precisely identified.
Besides the analysis of tuberculosis as a homogeneous social construct, the present dissertation takes the patients’ points of view into account. Tuberculosis is a social disease that characterises a group of individuals and isolates them from the rest of society. A focus on individuals who were treated in a network of free dispensaries, hospitals and sanatoriums helps us understand their position in the social landscape of Barcelona at that time : prior to being diagnosed with tuberculosis, the patients had been working and were often marginally integrated to the city’s life without being altogether socially isolated. Contracting the disease is what downgraded them to the category of medically treated paupers.
More than a common status though, tuberculosis was a personal experience for the individuals struggling against the disease and getting cured. The latter’s clinical files provide a bottom-up perspective on medical institutions and on the logics of modern medical discourse. The patients’ individual trajectories in the capital of Catalonia further blur the unified and homogeneous reference to tuberculosis, as they give priority to personal concerns over health requirements and over the absolute necessity of the fight against the bacillus, thus revealing diverging contemporary understandings of the fight against tuberculosis.

Key words:
City, Tuberculosis, Barcelona, Urban History, Hygiene, Public Health, XXth century, Social space, exclusion.

The seventeenth century was Holland’s “Golden Age”. According to the geographer H.J. Keuning, it could also be characterized as the “Age of Amsterdam”. In the period between 1578 and 1672, Amsterdam grew from a small harbour town, to one of the largest cities in Europe. This growth resulted in two giant city extensions, which were laid out and built in the years 1612-1620 and 1663-1682. These include the now famous canal belt, but also large mixed-use areas around it, and harbour areas along the IJ sea-branch. From these city extensions, a unique historical source was passed down: the cartographic and archival administration of the sale of building plots, mostly by auction. Most of the auction books and “uitgiftekaarten” (ground issue maps) have survived and are available for research. Together, they make up a detailed image of the development of Golden Age Amsterdam. The Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam (the city’s archive), have taken the initiative of building a geographic information system, in which the layout, the buyers, the date of sale, the ground price per unit, and other data will be made available digitally.

Scholars of Ireland and Irish religion too often neglect geography and geographical change. This book employs new spatial technologies to argue that the history of Irish religion through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot be understood outside of its spatial context. This critical period in Irish history encompasses the Famine, Partition, and the Troubles as well as longer-term trends such as urbanisation and industrialisation. All of these issues have had impacts that have varied geographically and temporally, but the rich data that are available on them have yet t be properly exploited, in part because of technological limitations which have now been overcome.

"This article describes the results of a project to use the maps of terrain and nineteenth-century rural settlement published in Roberts and Wrathmell’s An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England to create data ready for use in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. The first part summarises the process by which the maps have been converted from their original format to GIS data. The contents of the resulting data collection are outlined, followed by a discussion of the means by which the data will be disseminated and some of the limitations of the data. The second part examines how the data on terrain and settlement nucleation and dispersion have been re-analysed using spatial analytical tools to examine patterns of rural settlement at a national scale. The conclusion sets out the wide-ranging potential for re-use of the Atlas materials in conjunction with other data."

Nel periodo compreso fra la fine del XVIII secolo e gli inizi del XIX secolo si è lentamente compiuto il  processo di industrializzazione di Roma. Basandosi sull’analisi di documenti d’archivio e cartografia storica, unitamente ad una ricognizione diretta sul territorio, lo studio si propone di esaminare le variazioni nella distribuzione territoriale delle industrie romane, che è un elemento fondamentale per la comprensione dell’attuale assetto urbanistico e territoriale della Capitale. Le industrie censite nei documenti sono state posizionate in un sistema GIS, realizzando mappe tematiche e diacroniche.
La comparazione fra i dati geografici relativi alle industrie dei periodi iniziale (1810) e finale (1925) presi in esame ha costituito la base per analizzare la progressiva decentralizzazione degli insediamenti produttivi romani e le direttrici d’espansione delle nuove zone industriali, in relazione ai principali fattori di localizzazione che le hanno determinate.

THE ROMAN INDUSTRIES FROM THE FRENCH OCCUPATION TO THE RISE OF FASCISM. A GIS ANALYSIS
Between the end of the XVIII century and the beginning of the XIX century the process of industrialisation of Rome was slowly carried out. Basing on the analysis of archive documents and historical cartography, together with a direct survey on the territory, this research proposes to examine the changing  in territorial distribution of roman industries, which is fundamental to understand the actual urban layout and the territorial planning of the Capital.
The industries recorded in the historical documents have been placed in a geographical information system, in order to create thematic and diachronic maps.
The comparison between geographic data related to the industries from 1810 to 1925 has formed the basis to analyse the gradual decentralization of production plants and the lines of expansion of the specific industrial zones of Rome, in relation to the main location factors.

Paper published in Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 65 (2015) p. 195-242.

Abstract: This paper discusses a recently proposed scenario of a climate-induced “Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean” in the 11th century AD. It demonstrates that such a scenario cannot be maintained when confronted with proxy data from various regions. On the other hand, data on the interplay between environment and economy in the Komnenian period (1081–1185) and evidence for a change of climatic conditions in the period of the Angeloi (1185–1204) is presented, arguing that climatic parameters should be taken into consideration when comparing socio-economic dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean with those in Western Europe. The necessity of further research on the regional as well as over-regional level for many aspects of the interaction between human society and environment in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean is highlighted.