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

CHAPTER 8: QUALITATIVE DATA IN GIS

8.1 Introduction

Chapter 7 described some well-developed quantitative techniques that could be used by a historian from a social science tradition. The use of qualitative data of the kind more likely to be more relevant to a researcher from the humanities end of the discipline is less well developed. The basic principles are the same: the GIS imposes a structure where data have spatial and attribute components and are organised in a series of layers, with each layer representing a different theme. This structure allows the user to explore the geographical relationships within the data. For historians working in social science this is likely to involve thematic mapping and analysis of statistical data in ways similar to those that have been well explored in other disciplines. For humanities scholars the data used are likely to be more complicated comprising textual descriptions, images, photographs, maps, sound and video. Although these are different from statistical data, if they can be geo-referenced using points, lines, polygons or pixels, then GIS can be used to explore them. Mapping will again be an important part of this but so will querying of the data to investigate the spatial relationships within and between layers of data and perhaps the calculation of summary statistics. Because far less research has been done in this area, this chapter is significantly shorter than some others. This reflects the fact that historians working with qualitative sources are defining the research agenda as they go rather than applying techniques that originated elsewhere.