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

CHAPTER 6: VISUALISATION FROM GIS

6.8 Conclusions

Mapping and visualising data and exploring them spatially allows new insight to be offered to the patterns contained within those data. This is an area that has traditionally been under-exploited by historians and it is hoped that the increasing use of GIS will lead to an increased awareness in the importance of space and geographical patterns among those conducting historical research. The ease of mapping and visualising data within GIS is leading to a change in the role of the map and in map authorship. Already, GIS has moved the map from an end product of a piece of research to an integral part of the process. Increasingly it is leading to a changing role of authorship. Traditionally research papers and atlases present a map prepared by the researcher together with some text in which the researcher explains what he or she believes the map shows. The advent of electronic technology is changing this. CD-based products such as SECOS and Internet-based resources such as Ray (2001) mean that the researcher is no longer attempting to tell the whole story. Instead the researcher makes the resources available to users (or readers) who interrogate the data themselves and use them to tell their own story.

The final word in this chapter, however, must be a word of warning. Maps distort and maps lie. Whether you are producing maps yourself or interpreting information from other people's maps, it is important to have a grhtml of the basics of cartography to be able to differentiate between the distortions that the map contains (deliberately or accidentally) and the real story that the data have to tell.