Keywords

1 A Place in History

“L’histoire d’un peuple est inséparable de la contrée qu’il habite.” This is the very first sentence from the Preface to Part One of Histoire de France, published in 1911 (Lavisse 1911). In contrast to what the title suggests, Part One is not about history; it is about geography. In this volume, the author, Vidal de la Blache, elaborated his idea that when peoples who had been migrating across the continents of the world finally settled in places which offered enough opportunities to make a living, these particular places required people to build specific kinds of settlements, use specific tools and create specific living arrangements to survive. All this would lead to a unique way of life, a genre de vie, which was ultimately shaped by the physical environment from which it emerged (Vidal de la Blache 1911; Baker 2003).

De la Blache’s genre de vie, this symbiotic relationship between man and environment and between history and geography, laid the foundation for many scientific disciplines: sociography, anthropology, folklore studies and, to some extent at least, historical science. This makes good sense, because history is not only unthinkable without time, but also without a spatial dimension. Space gives a structure to human behaviour, and the history of human behavior can be appraised much better when geography is drawn into it. The inclusion of geography into the study of historical developments and processes has been advocated from the very beginning of history as a science. The clearest exponent was Fernand Braudel, one of the founding fathers of modern social, economic and cultural history, and a member of the Annales group of Social and Economic History. According to Braudel, historical developments can better be understood if we recognise three levels of histories that all have a different timespan:

  • histoires évenementielles: the short timespan, which more or less coincides with the political domain of history;

  • histoire conjuncturel: the longer timespan, which coincides with the economic domain;

  • longue durée: the very long timespan, which coincides with the geographical domain (Braudel 1958).

It is the longue durée which evolves unnoticeably from semi-permanent structures which are there because of differences between spatial units or “locations”. What a “location” is, has not been stated more precisely by Braudel. He himself has taken the entire Mediterranean basin as a location for his study Le Méditerrannée, which dealt with the history of that area in the 16th century (Braudel 1949). But his successors within or outside the Annales group often chose to study a smaller region: Le Pays d’Oc for example, or, in the Netherlands, the provinces of Overijssel and Friesland and the Noorderkwartier region (Slicher van Bath 1957; Bloch 1929; Faber 1973; Woude 1972).

Despite the success of the Annales school and its successors all over the world, mainstream historical science has not embraced geography wholeheartedly. The reason for this is threefold. In the first place, the idea of the longue durée – historical processes which pass through specific developments because of a spatial, structural setting – has been popularised to a fixed spatial setting within which only one fixed kind of human behaviour is normative, or even imperative. It is these kinds of Blut und Boden theories that have helped to marginalise place in history. Secondly, historians have a tendency to take the nation as a regional focal point. But the nation is a “modern” construct. It cannot yet have permanent structural attributes, and therefore cannot serve as a setting within which long-term historical regional processes should be studied. And thirdly, in recent decades historical science has drifted away from social science, and thus from quantification and statistics. Differences between regions are no longer an input to or purpose of statistical analysis, but a contextual platter of cultural, anthropological and psychological axioms to be used as a setting for describing specific regional features in a literary fashion. One can say that, as a consequence, “space” has gained weight in historical science, whereas geography has not – until recently.

2 Geo-ICT and the Uses of Geography in Historical Research

Although it is evident that geography has not been given due credit as a foundation for explanatory models in historical science, there are developments within historical science that seem to justify the claim that there is a shift of interest towards geography. Without doubt this has to do with the coming of age of Historical Geographical Information Systems. There is a Historical GIS Research Network (St-Hilaire et al. 2007) and a Historical GIS discussion list (Ell et al. 2006), and in 2007 the History Department at Idaho State University was the first to start a graduate study in geographically-integrated history, which is based on GIS (Marsh 2007). Numerous papers have been presented on historical GIS related subjects at history conferences, notably at large international ones within the domain of economic or social history, such as the American Social Science History Association (SSHA) and European Social Science History (ESSH) conferences, and recently also at large general history conferences (Owens 2006). Not only do these conferences have growing numbers of special sessions on the use of GIS in historical research, but more importantly, a growing number of GIS-based papers are delivered outside these special sessions. Whereas the 2000 SSHA conference had two sessions on historical GIS and no GIS-related presentation outside these sessions, the 2007 SSHA featured seven GIS sessions and three presentations outside of them. Moreover, quite a few historical journals have published special issues on practices within the field of historical GIS: Social Science History (2000), History and Computing (2001), Histoire & Mesure (2004) and Historical Geography (2005). Finally, during the last ten years half a dozen books have been published as introductions to the concepts and uses of GIS for historians (Berger et al. 2005; Gregory 2003; Gregory and Ell 2008; Knowles 2002; Knowles and Hillier 2008; Ott and Swiaczny 2001). What these papers, articles and books all show is that within historical science GIS is mainly used as a tool for arranging and visualising historical events and situations. This suggests that only limited use is made of the potential applications of Geo-ICT because there are more ways to use GIS in history. There are six different ways that Geo-ICT applications and related tools can be used in historical science: for presentation, exploration, reconstruction and analysis, as a portal to historical information and to facilitate research.

2.1 Geo-ICT as a Presentation Tool

Geo-ICT is used as a presentation tool when the main object is to visualise information, be it location-specific information, regional variation or, more specifically, regional variation through time when other visualisation methods like tables, figures, graphs and text fall short. Of course, “presenting” history with maps has a long tradition. In the nineteenth century historical maps and atlases were designed to display historical events and regional variations, such as Minard’s famous visualisation of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia (Minard 1869). Nowadays, the ease with which maps can be created digitally allows atlases to be published with hundreds of maps showing historical events and regional variation for specific themes, times or regions. A fine example is England on the Eve of the Black Death, an atlas based on 15,000 14th century personal wills and thousands of manorial extents and accounts. GIS has been used to create more than 180 maps on manorial structure, land tenure, land use, agriculture, milling resources, markets, fairs, taxable wealth and the tax-paying population to reveal the human geography in England during the fifty years before the Black Death struck the country (Campbell 2006). Other examples include Kennedy et al. (1999), Pitternick (1993) and Spence (2000).

A key vehicle for visualising historical events and regional patterns is the internet, not only because the creation and presentation of maps is much cheaper using the internet, but also because web pages are able to represent changes over time much better than printed atlases. A good example of such a web-based atlas is the Social Explorer, which has a feature to make a slide show from multiple choropleth maps (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1
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To visualise changes over time, the web-based Social Explorer has a feature to make video presentations from multiple choropleth maps, in this case for racial segregation in New York City, 1910–2000 (New York City 1910 to 2000 race map, 15 Nov. 2007)

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2.2 Geo-ICT as a Tool for Exploration

When GIS is used as a tool for exploration instead of presentation, it is not the GIS technique itself which makes it different, but the goal. The purpose is not to visualise patterns that are already known to the researcher, but to discover patterns within regional variations that have not been explored before and try to find explanations inductively. In most cases maps are used for this purpose. Take, for instance, the map by the famous Belgian statistician Alphonse Quetelet, the first choropleth map ever published in the Netherlands (Quetelet 1827). It copies to some extent the map which Charles Dupin drew for France one year earlier (Dupin 1826, published in Dupin 1827). Quetelet’s map shows very marked differences in school attendance between the provinces of the Netherlands, which had not been noted before. The regional differences could to some extent be explained by differences in religion, the north being Protestant and the south being Roman Catholic, and also in economic prosperity, pre-industrial Flanders being much worse off economically than elsewhere. Modern visualisations of similar data (municipal rather than provincial) show much more regional variation, which cannot be accounted for by religion and economy alone (see Fig. 6.2). This prompts new discussions and interpretations (Boonstra and Schuurman 2009).

Other examples of the explorative use of historical GIS include Gregory and Ell’s new analysis of the Great Famine in Ireland, in which they map parish level demographic data and challenge existing theories of the causes of the famine (Gregory and Ell 2005a), and Andrew A. Beveridge’s articles and essays on changing population patterns in New York City using his Social Explorer (Beveridge 2002, 2006).

Fig. 6.2
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School attendance and illiteracy in the Netherlands, 1800–1825. Left, Quetelet’s map of 1829 showing school attendance in 1817, aggregated at the provincial level; right, Boonstra’s map of illiteracy 1800–1825, aggregated at the municipal level. Traditional explanations of differences, based on provincial data, are no longer adequate

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Fig. 6.3
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Jensen and Keyes’ reconstruction of the city of Aarhus, Denmark, 1801

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2.3 Geo-ICT as a Tool to Make Reconstructions

Reconstruction is also a major feature of GIS for use in historical science. Maps and data can be combined to reconstruct historical and archaeological landscapes and settlements, as well as historical events and historical situations. The process itself can lead to new insights. An example is the reconstruction of the historical map of Aarhus, Denmark, by Garry Keyes and Jens Toftgaard Jensen (Jensen and Keyes 2003). As no historical land register map of the city from the early nineteenth century exists, use of GIS required the construction of a credible map based on the geographical information and structure inherent in the textual sources. The resulting digital map enables spatial analysis to uncover patterns in urban social and economic structures (Fig. 6.3). The spatial distribution of wealth and occupations, for instance, give an insight into the structure of the town that was simply impossible to obtain before. It also makes it possible to retrieve information on dwellings or households at an individual level.

There are a few other famous GIS-based reconstructions in the field of historical study. An early example is Schenk’s effort to recreate a historical map of land use in southern Germany (Schenk 1993). Nina Piotukh’s reconstruction of the Novorgev district in Russia (Piotukh 1996) and Capizzi’s reconstruction of land parcels that were split because of the building of fortifications around Paris in 1840–1860 (Capizzi 2004) are particularly imaginative. Other GIS-based reconstructions include Harris (2000), Lilley et al. (2005) and Gauthiez (2004).

2.4 Geo-ICT as an Analytical Tool

GIS is used as an analytical tool when special spatial, GIS-related statistical software is used to analyse historical geographical variations or spatial developments over time. The first is called spatial historical analysis, the second spatiotemporal analysis. There are not that many examples of GIS analysis within the field of history. Varet-Vitu and Pirot made a spatial analysis of the locations of administrators of health and public hygiene in the Paris basin around 1850 (Varet-Vitu and Pirot 2004). Another example of spatial historical analysis is the Valley of the Shadows Project, which studied differences in the socioeconomic landscape of southern Augusta County and northern Franklin County before the outbreak of the American Civil War (Sheehan-Dean 2002). Peter Doorn has made a spatiotemporal analysis of the location of settlements in Aetolia, Greece over a very long period of time (Doorn 2006). He found that the location of settlements shifted constantly from prehistory to the present, reflecting changing environmental and social conditions as well as changing preferences. In dangerous times, for example, it would have been sensible to choose a hilltop location and accept the problem of securing a supply of water, whereas in more peaceful times a settlement would flourish better near pasture and arable land. When height, slope, access to water and access to arable land are taken into account, five clusters of landscapes can be discerned. Roman settlements were much more inclined to favour access to arable land, whereas in the Byzantine period settlements were located on the slopes of mountains. Other examples of analytical uses of Geo-ICT are Ashbrook (2006), Chareille et al. (2004), Gregory (2000), Knowles and Healey (2006), Pearson and Collier (1998) and Skinner et al. (2000).

2.5 Geo-ICT as a Portal to Historical Information

What Jensen and Keyes have done to retrieve specific individual information from their reconstructed map (see Fig. 6.3) can be done in a more standardised way using Geo-ICT as a tool to access location-specific information. Google Maps and Google Earth are well-known examples of GIS portals to this type of information; Google Earth even supports the visualisation of historical maps on top of today’s geographical features.Footnote 1 But there are other advanced tools designed specifically to enable public access to historical information. An attractive example from the Netherlands is the Historical Atlas of Nijmegen. Starting from a modern map you can zoom in on a smaller area, after which you can retrieve all kinds of cultural and historical information, from modern day topography to the topography of 1832, historic buildings in the neigbourhood and the archival records of these buildings (Historische @tlas Nijmegen, 15 Nov. 2007). The Electronic Cultural Atlas (ECAI) uses a map to locate archaeological finds and cultural information and (Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, 15 Nov. 2007). The Wat was waar (“What was where”) website goes a step further: by pinpointing a location on a map, and – if desired – by selecting a time period, all archival records related to that particular location within the selected time period are shown (Wat was waar, 15 Nov. 2007; see Fig. 6.4).

Fig. 6.4
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The Wat was waar website allows the user to select a specific location on a map; all historical information related to that particular location is then shown

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2.6 Geo-ICT as a Tool to Facilitate Research

Acquiring historical data and maps for Geo-ICT purposes is not an easy job. Millions of non-digitised data are scattered throughout the archives, and digitising these handwritten or badly typeset data is no sinecure. Most historical maps are not yet available in a digitised format, let alone georeferenced or digitally stretched to match modern coordinate systems, and historians do not have the capacity to do all this work by themselves. It is therefore of great help when organisations make the effort to put their spatial data, their maps and their analytical tools at the disposal of researchers. Users do not then need to create a GIS of their own, or digitise maps and data themselves. Of course, the system must not limit the user too much, because of financial restrictions, for example, or limited ability to acquire the data and maps or to visualise the data. Unfortunately, most interactive historical GIS systems are limited in one way or another. The Portuguese Atlas Geografica Histórica can produce maps from a lot of data, but they cannot be downloaded (Atlas Cartografia Histórica, 15 Nov. 2007). The same is true for the Dutch Bevolkingatlas (15 Nov. 2007) and the HGIS Germany (15 Nov. 2007). The United States National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides free aggregate census data and GIS-compatible boundary files for the United States from 1790 to 2000, but no interactive online GIS to link these datasets (National Historical Geographic Information System, 15 Nov. 2007). The Social Explorer can only map a set of pre-defined census variables (Social Explorer, 15 Nov. 2007).Footnote 2 Good examples of really interactive GIS systems are the Belgian Historical GIS (15 Nov. 2007) and the China Historical GIS, in which a dataset can be downloaded, analysed and uploaded again to create a map (China Historical GIS, 15 Nov. 2007).

3 Obstacles to Historical GIS

There may be six different ways of using Geo-ICT related tools in historical science, but this does not mean that these tools are used to the full. Even books reviewing the state of the art of historical GIS make two things clear: there is a huge difference between the actual and the potential number of historians using GIS, and when historians do work with GIS, it is outside traditional history departments. Obviously, these are obstacles to historical GIS that prevent its full use.

3.1 Actual and Potential Use of Historical GIS

Historical GIS seems to be restricted to a few uses. Table 6.1 shows the potential and actual use of historical GIS formats, subdivided into the three Geo-ICT frameworks as defined in Chapter 1. There is an overwhelming difference between potential and actual use of historical GIS, with the exception of its use as a presentation tool.

Table 6.1 Potential and actual use of historical GIS, by historical GIS tool
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Table 6.1 confirms that the potential for the use of Geo-ICT within historical science is not used to the full. For some reason, historians have little intention of using Geo-ICT. The true situation is revealed by considering the stages of Geo-ICT in historical GIS. Table 6.2 shows the actual stages of Geo-ICT integration in historical science.

Table 6.2 Stages of Geo-ICT integration in historical science
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A fair number of universities (but not a majority) have one or two keen champions of historical GIS, and sometimes guest speakers are invited. A fair number of conferences (but not a majority by far) have GIS sessions in their programmes. But the big threshold is at level four, staff training. Staff have been trained to teach and use Geo-ICT in historical science only at a very small number of universities.

3.2 Historical GIS Outside History Departments

Another feature which hampers the growth of historical GIS is that historical research with a spatial component is restricted mainly to historical subdisciplines that are not taught within traditional history departments, but outside them, in historical geography, historical economics and historical sociology departments. The technology of Geo-ICT has not been accepted within traditional historical departments, where it is perceived to have little practical application and to be difficult to use. Historians tend to be late when it comes to adopting new technology, even when its ease of use has been established by a large majority of non-historians. But perceived usefulness is a bigger problem. Historians remain sceptical about visualisation. Visualisation has always had limited relevance for historical science, and only as a visual attachment to things that have been stated in words. That visualisation has an added value, that it can serve as a heuristic device, has been recognised by some – mostly specialists in cultural history like Peter Burke and Simon Schama – but not by all. That it can serve as a basis for spatial modelling and spatial analyses of regional variations and developments in the past is way beyond the scope of a traditional historian.

As a consequence, the use of Geo-ICT in historical science is hampered not only by a widespread lack of methodological interest and knowledge among historians, but also by the impossibility to gain such knowledge. Geo-ICT has the privilege of sharing this dubious honour with many other modern methodological tools, and the ignorance of modern methodological tools for historical research in general is alarming. Students now receive little or no training in methodological tools relevant to historical science, whether statistics, palaeography or GIS. Geo-ICT will consequently be used only in a limited way within historical science. Stunning historical examples of Geo-ICT will be presented in other disciplines well before historical science itself, if that happens at all.

3.3 Time, Data and Historical GIS

The lack of knowledge and interest in methodological issues is not the only problem. Geo-ICT has a methodological problem of its own, and a major data problem too. The methodological problem of Geo-ICT is that it has not yet been able to resolve a number of spatiotemporal issues. A problem common to historical GIS applications is that boundaries, and as a consequence geographic locations, tend to change over time (Gregory 2002; Gregory and Ell 2005b; Ott and Swiaczny, 2001). Peuquet has stated that a fully temporal GIS must be able to answer three types of queries (Peuquet 1994):

  1. 1.

    Changes to a spatial object over time, such as “Has the object moved in the last two years?”, “Where was the object two years ago?” or “How has the object changed over the past five years?”

  2. 2.

    Changes in the object’s spatial distribution over time, such as “What areas of agricultural land use in 01/01/1980 had changed to urban by 31/12/1989?”, “Did any land use changes occur in this drainage basin between 01/01/1980 and 31/12/1989?”, and “What was the distribution of commercial land use 15 years ago?”

  3. 3.

    Changes in the temporal relationships between multiple geographical phenomena, such as “Which areas experienced a landslide within one week of a major storm event?” or “Which areas lying within half a mile of the new bypass have changed from agricultural land use since the bypass was completed?”

Gregory comes to the conclusion that at the moment there is no GIS system that can cope with these three issues (Gregory 2003).

But even more problematic are the data problems that are inherent to historical science. For instance, the linkage of data to spatial units (as Jensen and Keyes did for the Aarhus reconstruction mentioned above) is a difficult task, not least because of the incomplete and fuzzy character of many historical sources. Although much has been done to visualise the uncertainty of information in maps (Couclelis 2003), the representation of historical data cartographically where both the source map and the data may contain such vaguenesses has not been satisfactorily resolved yet (Unwin 1995). Maps may look more convincing than is justified by the obscurity, ambiguity or incompleteness of the sources. Besides, of the millions of location-specific data in the archives, only a small number have been digitised, and a smaller number still have had location-related metainformation added. It is the sixth use of historical GIS, facilitating, that is the key issue for historical science. GIS will only have a chance of taking off in history when a relevant number of maps have been digitised, vectorised and georeferenced, and the relevant location-stamped data have become available.

4 Geo-ICT and Its Place in History

In her new book on historical GIS, Kelly Ann Knowles claims that GIS is on the brink of changing historical scholarship: “Quantitative social science historians are embracing GIS already to facilitate the mapping of large datasets, and any other historian with access to the software and the skills to use it can include mapping in research as well” (Knowles and Hillier 2008). According to Knowles, this change is little short of revolutionary, considering how few scholars or students made maps even ten years ago. She continues: “Historical maps are suddenly in great demand as digitally modified, georeferenced images that enable researchers to study GIS as a visual medium of communication and analysis.” I am not that optimistic. At the moment, the number of historians who actually use Geo-ICT is very, very low. Jack Owens, who is a prominent GIS-using historian, recently stated that GIS still is largely unknown among the vast majority of professional historians: “a significant percentage of those who believe they know about the technology think it is something they can buy with their next car so that they will not become lost” (Owens 2007). I have to agree with Owens. Fifty years ago, the effort to bring geography into history had limited success; thirty years ago, cliometrics triumphantly entered the domain of historical research, only to wane after a decade. Twenty years ago, it was historical information science that would definitively change historical scholarship, but it did not.

Historical GIS deserves to do better, but I have serious doubts. The problem is that history curricula at universities around the world devote too little attention to teaching research methods and techniques that go beyond the methods of traditional historical science. The heuristic skill of searching, retrieving and evaluating scientific historical literature is practised, but no attention is paid to the methods needed to retrieve historical information from historical data. Academic culture has proven to be a major barrier for statistics and information science in history, and it will be a barrier for Geo-ICT. As a consequence, there is no place in history.