A place in history: a guide to using GIS in historical research

CHAPTER 6: VISUALISATION FROM GIS

6.5 Electronic visualisation from GIS

With a paper atlas the authors produce one or more maps, some text, and perhaps some diagrams, and use these to tell a story. Electronic media and GIS allow the author to present the user with the spatial and attribute data and allow the user to produce maps and diagrams themselves. This allows them to explore the data and, perhaps, tell their own story or investigate the places and themes they are most interested in. Effectively this involves giving the user prepared spatial and attribute data held in a software package that has the basic mapping and querying facilities of GIS software but is easy to use and, perhaps, steers the user down certain routes. A good example of this was produced by Gatley and Ell (2000). They produced a system on CD-ROM that contains a variety of census, poor law and vital registration data from 1801 to 1871. The statistics provide the attribute data, with polygons representing the administrative units providing the spatial data. The package allows the user to query the data to produce maps, graphs, pie-charts, and other diagrams. If the user creates maps, the shading and class intervals can be changed and individual polygons can be queried. In the United States, the Great American History Machine (Miller and Modell 1988) was intended to be a similar system. This held census data and statistics from the presidential elections from 1840 to 1970 at county-level, giving over 3,000 units. Users were free to use these data to produce choropleth maps of their own to explore the data. Unfortunately, this system was never properly published commercially.