Todays GIS services does in fact bring a new dimension and greater understanding to the historical perspective.

Visual representation history is communicated faster and more effective and gives greater context to the historical story.

I have tried to use art or art history as a tool to help create that interconnected world history, but without his power to create meaningful and compelling abstractions. Perhaps, before I meet St. Peter or Buddha ow whoever….. He shone a powerful beam which could still help light the way.

In my first contribution, I pointed out that historians are wedded to narrative and as a result few think spatially or use maps. Comments by David Staley and A.B. have supported this observation. I would like to add
a couple of more practical points. So far, contributions to this
discussion are from scholars and graduate students who use GIS. Indeed, several of the contributors are leaders in the field. But for historians and others not familiar with GIS, the prospect of learning GIS or relying on a GIS technician raises the practical matter of deciding how to allocate scarce time and limited resources. In many ways, it is much easier to write an article or book (i.e. a narrative) than to invest time learning GIS techniques, creating a historical GIS database, and generating thoughtful research. In other words, GIS is a technical barrier which carries significant costs. Given shrinking university budgets, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, I can understand why so few historians have made the investment. Moreover, history departments, unlike geography departments, are not known for investing in lab spaces and technical courses. If history departments are not willing to make the investment in labs and courses, then teaching in HGIS has to fall on other departments and units. Such an arrangement is hardly conducive to the growth of HGIS. Perhaps HGIS will remain predominantly in the hands of a few historical geographers in geography departments?

Both David Staley and Anne Kelly Knowles have suggested approaches that should excite historians in the near future. It is difficult to convey only in writing any narrative shaped by multi-dimensional situations and nonlinear dynamics, which would include dynamics exposed through landscape visualizations. I wonder if the continued recourse to writing alone, despite its deficiencies as a communication medium, might be due in part to a lack of funding, as Anne suggests, a lack of a research infrastructure for collaboration, and a lack of data in digital form.

On the latter front, I want to point to two other European Science Foundation networks, besides mine, that are developing data, both quantitative and qualitative, of use for geographically-integrated world histories. Books about both research programs are available on their web sites:

Histories from the North – environments, movements, narratives (BOREAS)
http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/boreas.html
Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present (Inventing Europe)
http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/inventing-europe.html

A general meeting of “Inventing Europe” at the end of 2007 provided the occasion for a very interesting meeting/workshop entitled “A Place in Europe: Historical GIS and New Perspectives on European and World History” (30 November – 2 December 2007, Barcelona, Spain). The program can be downloaded from a link on the page:
http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/inventing-europe/events.html

An interesting report, drafted in part by Ian Gregory and entitled “A Place in Europe: Developing a Historical GIS for the European Union”, resulted. One quotation ties the draft report (I have never seen a final one) to our discussion of world history:

“HGIS-Europe will facilitate greater scholarly and analytical attention to the connected nature of world history, including its contemporary expression in the form of a globalized economy and transnational transportation, financial, and communication networks. It is essential to understand Europe’s connections to and influences on the wider world to understand topics such as investment patterns and migration”.

Ian, please say something about what happened to this ambitious report and about what the integrative, collaborative project it outlined might do to stimulate greater attention among historians to the potential for GIS, geographically-integrated history, and geo-visualization of the types that Anne discussed. Thank you.

As a researcher in geospatial visual analytics and a chair of the Commission on GeoVisualization of ICA (International Cartographic Association), I would like to point you on the emerging research of analysis of movements. Our community is developing methods for detecting patterns and trends in data sets of movement data, examples of patterns are:
– hotspots (places visited more frequently than others) and their development and migration in time;
– “special” time moments with abnormal activity patterns;
– places of frequent starts and ends of trips, their temporal characteristics;
– typical and atypical routes taken between starting and ending points of interest;
– interactions (who systematically meets whom, where and when);
– …

Some of the methods have been applied in historical research, see
“Visual exploration and analysis of historic hotel visits” by Chris Weaver and others, http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ivs/journal/v6/n1/abs/9500145a.html

For the representative sample of ongoing research you may look at Special Issue of Information Visualization on Geovisualization of Dynamics, Movement and Change, see http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ivs/journal/v7/n3/index.html

Geovisualization researchers would like to cooperate with historical researchers who has interesting data sets and problems.

It is too bad that we cannot see some of the visualizations of the project Derrick Sharp describes. His work provides a good example of an innovative project that can be accomplished with current GIS software despite its limitations. Pocatello sits in a narrow mountain valley. I live in the historic Central West Side just one block west of the river. If I walk two blocks farther to the west, I am climbing into the mountains. If I walk four blocks to the east of my house, I am in the middle of the historic downtown area now known as Old Town Pocatello. The terrain has produced complex flooding patterns involving much more than the river, and Derrick’s work is helping us understanding the nature of 20th-century floods.

I apologize to A.B. for missing the query to H-World. I often must put H-World on nomail status when I am out of the U.S. because otherwise I become overwhelmed by all of the messages. I quite agree with the observation that spatial considerations play little role in most teaching of history. At Idaho State University, we are trying to deal with this problem through a transformation of our undergraduate curriculum. We hope also to have an impact on the way that history is taught at the secondary school level. Of course, our Master’s degree program in geographically-integrated history –the M.A. in Historical Resources Management to which Derrick Sharp referred—is designed to train historians, some of whom will become teachers, to give spatial issues a major place in their history classes.

I am afraid that A.B. misunderstood my comment about GIS visualizations. I was responding to Stephen Hornsby’s position paper, in which he comments on the poor cartographic quality of most GIS visualizations. He says, “Fourth, the GIS that I have seen always seem clunky. The aesthetic representation of data in a GIS hardly seems to have been addressed. I have yet to see a GIS that comes close to the work of a good cartographer.” Cartography is a powerful form of communication, but to be effective, a cartographic representation must be carefully designed to convey the desired message. A GIS visualization will seldom accomplish this end because it is frequently cluttered with data that distracts from what the creator wants to communicate and the current GIS software packages still do not permit cartographic production of the highest quality. Frankly, many GIS users do not know much about cartography. Maps and other forms of visual information can certainly carry narratives, as David Staley asserted, but to do so, they must be well designed to communicate clearly the intended message. David has written about the need for such effective visualization designs.

One of the greatest potential areas for growth in historical geovisualization is the recreation of past landscapes. Whether one renders a past landscape very simply (such as drawing layers on tissue paper to view over a light table) or in complex, highly professional 2-D maps or 3-D simulated environments, they can be tremendously helpful in prompting careful, creative thinking about places, spatial relationships, living conditions, social hierarchies, and much more. Cultural and social history could benefit greatly from more and better visualization of geographic information. Some questions would require precise recreation of past landscapes, but not all. Rendering past landscapes’ physical conditions could also provide otherwise unavailable information for answering important questions. For example, creating a reasonably accurate digital elevation model and street plan of an industrial town based on British Ordnance Survey maps could enable researchers to test water flow or dominant patterns of air circulation as vectors for the transmission of contagious disease or diseases caused by industrial pollution.

Another very promising area is the use of GIS, cartographic overlay, and animation to reveal change over time and to explore the spatial and temporal relationships between many historical phenomena. These are methods that a group of researchers working on the geographies of the Holocaust will be using in hopes of revealing previously invisible, and therefore unknown, patterns in the growth of the concentration camp system in relation to the movement of front lines, location of industry, and other factors that may have influenced the system’s development. Exploratory visualization of complex variables does require the various kinds of expertise that the comments point to — and it probably requires collaboration at a scale that only some social science historians are used to — but I’d not underestimate the potential for such approaches to excite historians, particularly if major funding agencies show interest in supporting such projects.

All of this is to say, however, that until there is a sea change in the discipline at large, visual representation of the past will not be fully accepted. History is a discipline that draws in writers; until we include among our ranks geographers, artists, and film makers, the discipline of history will more than likely remain confined only to “word people.”

I want to express my gratitude to my colleagues for the care with which they read my article and for the valuable comments they offered. I think that I can best move the discussion forward by responding directly to their queries. However, I fear that in doing so, I am moving beyond the interests of many of those in my target audience, who are world historians who might be interested in but have little experience with computational methods of turning their information into knowledge. Perhaps some of these world historians will be willing to call me back to earth with comments and queries about the parts of my article that deal with the ideas of Andre Gunder Frank and Joseph Levenson as important world historians.

In order to offer a combined response to both position papers, which share a number of common elements, I will say something about my conception of Geographically-Integrated History without intending to implicate my departmental colleagues in these views. Moreover, I am going to use some language that my son-in-law, a physicist, says that I should never use in public. I hope to make clear that I see this perspective as a transformative one, which is not intended in any way to be some intermediate stage between history and historical geography.

Geographically-Integrated History is a paradigm with five major components
1. Research projects must involve collaboration among domain experts on the historical systems, geographic information scientists, and mathematical modelers;
2. Data should be georeferenced to geographic place defined by coordinates of longitude and latitude;
3. The history of any place is shaped in significant ways by the way the place is connected to other places and by the changes in these connections over time;
4. Historical periods are complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems that are spatially large, and in more recent centuries global in extension, and that sometimes become unstable, leading to a phase transition, bifurcation, and the organization of a new system;
5. Within such systems, people and places are connected by self-organizing networks that are the sources of innovation and the emergence of new forms.

As both Ian and Stephen indicate, current GIS suffer from some serious defects. Time is handled badly; statistical analysis is limited to relationships among a small number of variables; and precision is demanded to the point where much information about the institutional and cultural environments of human life appears to be excluded from consideration. As one deals with periods before the nineteenth century, as I do, information tends to be particularly vague, uncertain, and incomplete, which makes it difficult to have confidence in the value of using GIS. Visualization can help relieve the weight on human cognition when dealing with complexity and a large number of variables, but GIS visualizations frequently play this role poorly. Although I have yielded the teaching of the course to my colleague, Sarah E. Hinman, I founded my department’s core course “Cartography: History and Design,” and I am especially interested in design (and the graphic arts in general). Both in that course and in my graduate course “Geographic Information Systems in Historical Studies,” I emphasize that one must never use GIS visualizations for any sort of public presentation.

However, computational thinking is essential if we are to address complex problems with success greater than that demonstrated by current work in history and historical geography, and I think that the way to deal with the limitations of current GIS software packages is to extend the concept. I do not want to monopolize discussion by extending my comments too much. Those interested in more detail about my multi-national, multi-disciplinary project “Dynamic Complexity of Cooperation-Based Self-Organizing Networks in the First Global Age [1400-1800]” (DynCoopNet) can now download in pdf an attractive book on the program of which the project is a part, “The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading” (TECT), at the URL:
http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/tect.html
The link is in the lower right corner of the page beside the image of the cover with the photo of the cute monkey. My article is pages 23-35, and at the end, you can read our professional standards for collaborative research, data sharing, and joint publication.

You can read some of our ideas about dealing with time in the article “Dynamics GIS” of my DynCoopNet colleague May Yuan of the University of Oklahoma at the URL:
http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/spring08articles/dynamics-gis.html

Both temporal processes and vague, uncertain, and incomplete information about geographic location and institutional and cultural factors are subject to sophisticated forms of mathematical modeling. For example, my DynCoopNet colleague Michael Sonis of the geography department of Bar-Ilan University is currently completing a book in which he models the diffusion of innovations, including the diffusion of ideologies of “aggressive intolerance” (his term). Another of my DynCoopNet colleagues, the mathematician Emery A. Coppola, Jr., and I have underway an experiment to use the fuzzy rule-based modeling based on the work of Lotfi A. Zadeh to accommodate the representation of degrees of trust among individuals in sixteenth-century smuggling networks within a GIS environment. In economics, quite sophisticated forms of spatial modeling of nonlinear dynamics exist that open the way toward a transformed conception of GIS and visualization. For example, look at the work of my DynCoopNet colleague Tönu Puu (Attractors, bifurcations and chaos: Non-linear phenomena in economics. 2nd Ed. Berlin & Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag, 2003).

I am not yet in a position to respond to Ian’s query about whether our work on cooperation within the commercial networks of the first global age, and not just in the Atlantic basin, will allow us to challenge any existing orthodoxies (of which there are few) and offer explanations of the phenomena we discover. The co-Project Leader of DynCoopNet, Ana Crespo Solana of the Historical Institute of Spain’s Superior Council of Scientific Research (known by its Spanish initials CSIC) is now assembling a variety of data sets about trade routes in the Atlantic basin from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Once this information is processed so that we can use GIS, perhaps we will have a better idea of what we can show.

Because complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems permit only limited prediction (think of weather forecasting), I do not have any idea whether historians will become interested in this sort of work, although I do believe that it will greatly enrich thinking about and understanding of world history. As Joseph Levenson showed so long ago, effective, explanatory narrative depends heavily on our ability to understand complex connections, and geographically-integrated history greatly facilitates the historian’s ability to grasp narrative processes within a dense web of connections. In terms of visualization among historians, I have been intrigued by the growing influence of David Staley’s Computers, visualization, and history: How new technology will transform our understanding of the past (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). Staley is the director of the Harvey Goldberg teaching center at The Ohio State University. Finally, as universities become increasingly dependent on external funding, historians will become marginalized if they do not embrace research forms that attract major grants, and I suspect that geographically-integrated history, with its foundation in the use of computational thinking to transform data into knowledge, lends itself to the formulation of a broad range of exciting funding proposals. The future for academic history departments may belong only to those who are willing to bridge the gaps between existing disciplinary networks to create new ideas.