One of the important concepts I took away from this week’s readings was that GIS can tell you where something is, but it cannot tell you why it is there.
I am glad that I have had an introduction (self-taught) to QGIS because this week’s material was dense. The articles put into words some of the struggles I have encountered already. Historical sources are often ambiguous, riddled with gaps, and inconsistencies, thus making WAY more work to think about the best ways to structure and input those sources into GIS.[1] The whole horizontal and vertical aspects of thinking like a geographer still boggles my mind, but as I read more scholarship focused on race and place, I can see the horizontal flow of community and culture. One of the points we brought up in class was the dehumanizing effect creating datasets can have on historical subjects. It seems that other scholars have thought this too with the push back HGIS received early on, however, I think ways to address this could include the historian’s “caveat” or “disclaimer” that accompanies the analysis or data visualizations. While data erases the human element, we as historians can put our subjects back by clearly articulating our methods and acknowledging the silences our data creates.
Even though the article about mapping Tokyo is 26 years old now, I appreciated the extensive methodological breakdown. Ultimately, I hope to include spatial analysis in my larger works and reading about other’s successes and struggles was beneficial.
It makes me happy to think that we have made it through the hardest module for the semester. The work we did in class was new for me. This was also a much nicer experience than my crash and burn trying to learn how to use QGIS on my own for a couple months. It had been about a year since I opened the software, and the refresher was great along with the formal training. It also makes me chuckle that I spent SO much time trying to georectify maps on MapWarper that I pulled from the David Rumsey collection that had already been done.
I am looking forward to testing the waters with mapping for my group’s final project. I think mapping is one of the best ways to grab an audience’s attention, especially if it is a public history project. There is an opportunity that our project will reinvigorate a relationship between Mason and a community partner which may foster future scholarship with their rich resources.
[1] GIS and its role in historical research: an introduction, 17.
I am glad you mentioned that mapping data can often dehumanize the subjects it tries to map. I think that this is fundamental to our project because we want to highlight and humanize the data as much as possible, and I would argue it is the point of the project.
Hi Andrew, I really enjoyed the extensive methodological breakdown of GIS in the mapping Tokyo article as well. It provided a lot of great insights and was really interesting. It’s great hearing about how all of our group projects are coming along, and that so many people want to have a mapping element!
“One of the important concepts I took away from this week’s readings was that GIS can tell you where something is, but it cannot tell you why it is there” is a succinct and clever way of framing the methodological challenges that come with GIS studies. I fully agree, GIS seems very useful, but we must be careful with how we use to draw conclusions. I think your group’s point on the humanizing effect of turning humanities sources is quite important, and something we can remember across quantitative studies of history. I’m excited to see what your group ends up doing with GIS studies!
Andrew,
I appreciate how you make the distinction between what GIS can help a historian achieve and what a historian brings to the GIS software. Exploring GIS, like you mentioned, was challenging, but now that we have utilized it, I truly see its relevance in creating history projects. I like to think that one cannot use GIS alone to address a historical problem or question. Historians must instead supplement their digital tool/GIS utilization with historical evidence at all times. These two areas can only operate in collaboration with one another since they are being used to address a certain inquiry. In doing this, we as historians can enhance our work and research, adding context and visual data that would not otherwise be present.