"About a 3 on the technologically literate scale": My Adventures with GIS

Yesterday we visited the GIS lab and had a workshop with Don Lafreniere. GIS is a geographic information system that uses raw data to recreate landscapes, city spaces, or buildings. Examples of recreations include “Rome Reborn” by Bernard Frischer or the military garrison in Victoria Park by Mark Tovey.

Map of Victoria Park as used by Mark Tovey in his research.

GIS is used as both a visual tool and analytical tool. Not only do GIS maps recreate a site but they can reveal trends in areas, cities, regions, or countries. As Patrick A. Dunae et alt. stated, “A relatively new tool for social historians, it offers novel way of exploring and understanding historical activities and the environments in which they took place.”(2) One can see where an area was historically filled with low-income families based on the submission of data about professions held by occupants. Researchers can also see on the same map how that area may have changed or remained stagnant over the decades. Although GIS can rarely reveal the “why” to questions, as it is quantitative data, it still has its benefits.

The Map of Napoleon's March to Moscow by Charles Minard shows how many and when soldiers died on the march to Moscow but does not reveal the cause of death. This is one of the limitations that GIS maps have.

Before reading up on reconstructed historical landmarks or GIS I had never been particularly interested in numerical data of the past. More often than not I would find myself skimming charts and other such information. Although I knew it was a critical feature of historical analysis, I didn’t really care how many servants lived in one area or what major resources were shipped out of which port. I didn’t even really care how big a monument was in square meters or the distance that a troop of soldiers covered over a two hour period in a heated battle. Why didn’t I care? I suppose it’s because I’m a visual learner and throwing a bunch of numbers in my face doesn’t really do anything for me. However, with GIS. the numbers can take on a physical manifestation that represents exactly what I need to know. Edward Tufte argues that the purpose of GIS mapping is to help with “content-reasoning tasks”(136) and this holds true for those wanting quantitative information without the monotonous chore of shifting through and making sense of numbers and statistics.

However, despite the ease of utilizing a GIS map to understand a concept, the creation of such a map is far from that. As I realized yesterday at the workshop, the act of georeferencing is not my idea of effortlessness and I gained a new appreciation for digital historians. We were asked to download a set of data and plug the documents into ArcGIS, one of the preferred GIS tools. After a couple of hours of being carefully led through the programming and playing catch-up to the group after encountering a couple of hiccups that left me bewildered, I finally understood a fraction of ArcGIS. It was not an easy task but the results were astounding. I had never considered using city directories or censuses to plot where particular individuals lived to show socio-economic trends. I had never thought to look at the change over time by superimposing images over one another.

 

A fire insurance plan given to us for our recreation of downtown London.
This was just one of many raw data sources Don Lafreniere compiled for this project.

Seeing that I’m about a 3 on the technologically literate scale and accidentally saved my finished project on the desktop instead of my hard drive, I have nothing to show for all the frustration I had after today’s workshop. But I do have a new appreciation for all the work digital historians put in to compiling raw data for the creation of one picture that communicates more than a chart of numbers will ever do.

Sources:

Dunae, Patrick A. at alt. "dwelling Places and Social Spaces: Revealing the Environments of Urban Workers in Victoria Usin Historical GIS". Labour 72 (2013): 1- 37.

Tufte, Edward R.. Beautiful evidence. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2006.