مقالات علمية في نظم المعلومات الجغرافية التاريخية
ترجمة: حسن عبد العزيز
المركز السعودي
لنظم المعلومات الجغرافية التاريخية
دارة الملك عبد العزيز
1434هـ
ترجمة لبعض المقالات العلمية
في كتاب
"Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (2002)"
وكتاب
Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008)
تصفح من هنا
Placing History: How Maps,
Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship
edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, with a digital supplement edited by Amy Hillier,
and a forward by Richard White.
Redlands, California: ESRI Press, 2008.
313 pp., 85 figures, endnotes, bibliography, index, author biographies, CD
insert.
$49.95. Softbound
ISBN 978-1-58948-013-1
Review by: Daniel G.
Cole, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
This book
springs from both a conference at the Newberry Library in 2004: “History and
Geography: Assessing the Role of Geographic Information in Historical
Scholarship”, and as a sequel of sorts to Knowles earlier edited work, Past
Time, Past Place: GIS for History (2002), to which it serves as a
compendium of projects now completed. More than half of this book’s chapters
range in topic across time and space, while the others provide theoretical and
methodological discussions usable for future research. In total, thirteen
authors from history, geography and planning departments across academia
present a forward, ten chapters and a conclusion to address how maps, spatial
data, and GIS are changing historical scholarship.
Knowles begins
the introductory chapter by identifying the differences between geographers and
historians and notes some reasons why historians have generally been reluctant
to use GIS. She posits that historical GIS (HGIS) scholarship combines
historical geography and spatial and digital history with databases that record
both locations and time thus enabling maps (including animations) to illustrate
changes over time. She uses examples to show that HGIS has been focused on the
themes of: the history of land use and spatial economy; reconstructing past
landscapes and built environments; and infrastructure projects to facilitate
the use of HGIS research. Lastly, Knowles helpfully addresses the conceptual
and technical challenges facing historians and geographers who plan to use GIS
in their research. Particularly, she discusses the paucity of colleagues doing
similar work, the ability to recognize geographic information embedded in
historical sources, the variable of accuracy in mapping over time, and the lack
of standards in documentation.
In chapter
two, Peter Bol describes the use of GIS for investigating the history of China,
in a study based at Harvard and Fudan universities. The China Historical GIS
(CHGIS) is an ambitious project covering more than 2100 years and ultimately
consisting of three elements: “a continuous time series of the administrative
hierarchy from the capital down to the county”; “major nonadministrative
settlements, particularly market towns that proliferated during the last
millennium”; and “historical coastlines, rivers, lakes, and canals” (p. 28).
The administrative structure has been modeled as points, i.e., capital – county
seat – village, with shifting lines and areas of control against the landscape.
Indeed, as Bol notes, “For much of the last millennium, demarcating boundaries
was the exception rather than the rule” (p. 42). Nonetheless, the CHGIS
maximizes the point coverage of settlements as much as possible so that
Thiessen polygons can be used to approximate the county boundaries over time.
Supplementing that data are compilations of local gazetteers, market networks,
lineal villages, and religious networks. In all, CHGIS aims to “take into
account such historical shifts in sources and spatial conceptions” (p. 54).
The third
chapter, “Teaching with GIS,” is split into two parts: “The Value of GIS for
Liberal Arts Education” by Robert Churchill; and “A Guide to Teaching
Historical GIS” by Amy Hillier. In Part I, using several pertinent examples,
Churchill discusses how GIS adds value to education. “First, GIS can teach
valuable analytical and problem-solving strategies that transcend disciplinary
boundaries. Second, GIS emphasizes visualization and underscores the
indispensable value of the visual by using maps to communicate results. Third,
GIS engages a variety of important and timely social, economic and political
issues. Finally, GIS can provide a pedagogy that at once serves and cuts across
traditional disciplines” (p. 63). In Part II, Hillier uses historical data from
Philadelphia to show how GIS was used in a course on urban history. Her
students’ examples range from W.E.B. Du Bois’s map of social class in 1896 to
maps of ethnicity, population, commerce, crime, transportation planning, and
mortgage practices for the city. Historically mapped data of these types
reflect the values and biases of the institutions and people mapping and being
mapped.
Chapter four,
by Geoff Cunfer, analyzes the history of the Dust Bowl from the late 19th
to the mid-20th century. His research challenges two assumptions:
that dust storms happened where most of the land was plowed, and that storms
only happened after the massive plow-up of the 1920s. He notes that in the
past, case studies were made of individual farms, locations and counties, and
he specifically describes one study from the 1970s that evaluates only two
counties in Oklahoma and Kansas during the 1920s-30s. More recently, GIS
technology has allowed the study of the entire central and southern Plains
region of the U.S.; in Cunfer’s case – 208 counties across portions of five
states and from the latter half of the 1800s forward. The author provides five
animated maps illustrating average annual rainfall and percentage total county
area devoted to cropland plotted against numbers of dust storms. His results
show that while plowing up the Plains did contribute to dust storms, this
action by farmers could not be the only factor since many dust storms occurred
upwind of plowing. A greater coincidence can be seen on his maps of drought
zones overlain by dust storm regions. Cunfer also extends his analysis back
into the 1800s by extracting data from local newspapers in the region, thus
demonstrating a non-standard method of data gathering for GIS databases.
Ian Gregory,
also a co-author with Paul Ell of a recent HGIS text (Historical GIS:
Technologies Methodologies and Scholarship, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2007), gives the reader a provocative title for chapter five: “A Map is
Just a Bad Graph: Why Spatial Statistics are Important in Historical GIS.” He
starts off by bemoaning the typical choropleth map produced by many GIS users.
Instead, he advocates going beyond the alleged limitations of thematic maps and
making use of spatial statistics in HGIS. I use the word ‘alleged’ since, after
all, any good cartographer or GIS specialist should already be aware of using
quantitative methods in their analyses. In balance, it must be said, he also
discusses the limitations of spatial statistics alone; particularly noting the
use of local versus global (or whole-map) statistics to avoid results with
spurious spatial correlations. Regardless, he points out how most GIS programs
only provide a subset of possible spatial statistical techniques. Gregory then
provides examples of three spatial analytical methods used in the study of the
Irish potato famine and its demographic consequences from 1841-1881, and of
infant mortality in Victorian and Edwardian England and Wales. Here, he
successfully aims “to show how spatial statistical provide new insights that
otherwise have been concealed by the complexity of the data” (p. 129). He
finishes by warning that while spatial statistics “is an important and
underused tool for historical GIS…the greatest challenge to the historian is
not performing these techniques but interpreting the patterns that emerge from
the data” (p. 146).
The sixth
chapter, by Brian Donahue, gives an overview of GIS for environmental mapping
of agricultural husbandry in colonial Concord, Massachusetts. He studied
various land records ranging from the original land grant in 1635 to the end of
the colonial period. His initial analysis makes use of surficial geology,
hydrology, and a derived layer of circa 1600 native landscapes. Donahue follows
with a map of the parcels of Concord’s ‘First Division’, where 50 families made
use of the land through divided holdings for houses, farming and pasture, as
well as parcels held in common. He then focuses on the divided, and often
widely dispersed, holdings of individual land holders and their descendants.
Parcels were typically irregular and described by metes and bounds; the author
mapped these by land ownership two-dimensionally and added the third dimension
of time. Obviously, his research involved a considerable amount of work interpreting
the colonial records and translating them into a GIS database. He concludes by
noting that “the bulk of land protection and stewardship in New England is
being done by local conservation groups” and that “GIS mapping can serve as a
useful tool to guide and inspire grassroots conservation efforts” (p. 175).
Michael
Goodchild delivers the seventh chapter on the future potential of temporal GIS.
In his text, he provides a historical background to GIS and spatial databases
followed by theoretical and methodological discussions on the conceptual design
and workings of a HGIS. Tracking data, to illustrate lifelines, migrations,
explorations and general tracks and flows, can be stored and handled in an
object-oriented database for historical analysis, while changing boundaries
over time are handled in a longitudinal database in a GIS. Goodchild gives an
excellent overall introduction to HGIS databases, and in my opinion his
manuscript should have been placed toward the front of the book.
Chapter eight,
by Richard Talbot and Tom Elliott, presents a project from the Ancient World
Mapping Center, specifically, the creation of a GIS database from the Peutinger Map of the Roman World. This
map is believed to be a copy of roman work from AD 300, and survives in 11
sections, each about 33 cm high by 62 cm wide. A series of scans preserves the
map in digital form from which route networks, point locations and physical
features were extracted and built into the GIS. Warping this map, however, was
not found to be a reasonable task given that the “scale, aspect, ratio, and
even the cardinality of the compass points shift from one part of the map to
the next as the design struggles to accommodate the competing pressures imposed
by its extreme shape” (p. 206). Instead, distance and point data were
transferred to the GIS while matching features to the digital version of the Barrington
Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton University Press, 2000). The
authors tested the assumption that the original cartographer set distances on
the map to local usage (Roman miles, Gallic leagues, etc) but the use of these
distance measures by the mapmaker(s) was far from consistent. Nonetheless, the
authors found that the fixing of known sites and routes helped fill in missing
places and find locations for previously unknown sites. They consider this
effort to be only the first stage in the larger work of mapping the Roman and
Greek worlds.
The ninth
chapter, by David Bodenhamer, outlines the implications of GIS for the
discipline of history. The author begins by complaining that many historians
rarely use, much less embrace, GIS technology, but he forecasts that “GIS may
have the most potential for breaching the wall of tradition in history for two
reasons: it maps information, thus employing a format and a metaphor with which
historians are conversant; and it integrates and visualizes information, making
it possible to see the complexity historians find in the past” (p.222). Whether
creating maps for academic papers or publishing a historical atlas, GIS
provides a platform for examining history. Given the viewing flexibility of
many GIS layers, the software enables views from multiple perspectives and
scales, an ability historians often desire. Regardless, “one of the most cited
impediments is the technology’s awkwardness or inability in managing ambiguous,
incomplete, contradictory, and missing data” (p. 126). Fortunately,
developments in GIS are gradually allowing better depiction of the dimension of
time, while historical maps are becoming more readily available (from sources
such as David Rumsey and the Library of Congress), and digital historical
gazetteers are often providing anchors to uncertain places of the past.
Bodenhamer sums by noting that “historical GIS offers an alternate view of
history through the dynamic representation of time and place within culture”
(p. 231).
In chapter
ten, Knowles postulates what Lee and other Confederate and Union commanders
could see of the Battlefield at Gettysburg. She notes that Lee, Meade and other
West Point graduates were schooled and practiced in the science of
topographical mapping, and thus had well developed talents for viewing and
reading terrain. Few maps existed of this or other eastern battlefields before
the engagements, so scouts and reconnaissance patrols could only report, and
commanders could only understand, the situation as it could be seen. Identifying
lines of sight and fields of vision is, therefore, vital for understanding
Lee’s and others’ actions and reactions.
Curtis
Musselman, cartographer and GIS coordinator of Gettysburg National Military
Park, shared the data layers of the area in and around the park, including the
current 3D terrain model. A second digital terrain model was necessarily
created from georeferenced historic maps produced by post Civil war army
topographers. Both the historic and modern map layers were combined to develop
viewsheds from points of prominence, such as Lee’s position atop the Lutheran
seminary on the west side of the village or the Union signalmen’s position on a
small hill known as Little Round Top. Overall, “the GIS viewsheds help one
imagine what might have gone through the minds of soldiers and commanders that
fateful day” (p. 260).
The concluding
chapter, by Knowles, Hillier and Balstad, sets an agenda for HGIS. While it is
no longer surprising to see historians using GIS in their research, its full potential
has yet to be realized. HGIS requires both quantitative and qualitative
scholarship. Since GIS, in general, works best in an interdisciplinary
environment, sharing duties between historians, geographers, economists and
demographers helps mix the best attributes of these fields and so results in
better analyses and the creation of new knowledge. A major challenge ahead is
to create institutional infrastructure for collaboration in HGIS. The authors
also campaign for the GIS software companies to “provide options for representing
uncertainty,” to develop “a tool that automatically creates data source notes
for maps” and to “calculate and represent spatial change over time more easily”
(p. 272).
The
supplementary CD comes with a copy of ArcExplorer, four PowerPoint presentations,
PDFs, animations and map documents. The PowerPoint slide shows, with
accompanying PDFs of the presentation notes, relate to Knowles’, Bol’s,
Hillier’s, and Cunfer’s chapters. Cunfer also provides five time-series
animations of southern Plains rainfall, cropland, and dust storms. In addition,
a link on the CD takes the reader to Knowles’ website which provides her
classroom handouts, as well as scanned and georectified versions of Warren’s
1874 map of the Battle of Gettysburg. Lastly, Hillier, Cunfer, and Bol share
three map documents and their associated map layers (TIFs and shapefiles) with
readers to learn more about their studies.
In summation,
this is an excellent book that should be shared and promoted with our
colleagues in History. While I have quibbles over the organization of its
chapters, the text is to be highly recommended as encouraging further work in
this realm. Because of this book, and other publications by Knowles, Hillier,
Bol, Gregory, and others, I look forward to future publications in the use of
GIS for History.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق