A Place in History - Section 1.1

The right of Ian Gregory to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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	A place in history: a guide to using GIS in historical research CHAPTER 1: GIS AND ITS USES IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH
	1.1 Introduction This guide is written for historians who want to use Geographical Information System (GIS) in their work. It covers both creating GIS databases, and exploiting the information held within them. The book attempts to use a minimum of jargon and does not assume any prior knowledge of GIS. It should be noted though that GIS is a technical subject, and some knowledge of computing will make the book easier to understand. In a short book such as this it is impossible to give a comprehensive treatment to most of the themes introduced. Instead the aim is to highlight the main themes and provide references that allow the reader to follow them up in more detail. There is an extensive literature on GIS but the literature on using GIS in historical research is currently limited. Anne K. Knowles's book (Knowles 2002) marks the first edited collection of case studies on historical applications of GIS and is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the field. Beyond this, the literature on using GIS for historical applications is widely scattered. This guide attempts to bring this literature together to illustrate how historians have used GIS. To this end each chapter provides summaries of case studies and details further reading on historical examples. As this literature is limited, some studies are quoted in more than one chapter but no study is used as a key reference more than once. The aim is to give the reader an understanding of both the structure of GIS, namely the way that it models the world, and an idea of the mentality that should be followed when using GIS for historical research.


	© Ian Gregory 2002 The right of Ian Gregory to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All material supplied via the Arts and Humanities Data Service is protected by copyright, and duplication or sale of all or any part of it is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your personal research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. Permission for any other use must be obtained from the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise, to any third party.