What Historians Want from GIS

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What Historians Want

from GIS
By J. B. "Jack" Owens
An increasing
number of
historians,
particularly
those dealing
with world
history or the
history of large
geographic
regions, are
becoming
interested in
using
geographic
Illustration by Jay Merryweather, Esri
information
systems for
research and teaching. Historians are noticing GIS because they
normally deal with processes in complex, dynamic, nonlinear
systems and, therefore, demand a means to organize a large
number of variables and identify those variables most likely
implicated in the stability and transformation of such systems.
However, GIS remains largely unknown among the vast
majority of professional historians, and a significant percentage
of those who believe they know about the technology think it is
something they can buy with their next car so that they will not
become lost. Even those interested in some sort of
geographically integrated history, a term I prefer to escape
some of the limitations of the more familiar GIS history, would
justifiably categorize the title of this article as pretentious.

GIS and History

I am often the only historian at geographic information science
(GIScience) meetings, and my presence provokes the obvious
question. A story will explain why a historian would become
interested in GIS. At the beginning of my graduate studies, I
read Fernand Braudel's La Mditerranee et le monde
mditerranen a l'poque de Philippe II because I was studying
the western Mediterranean in the 16th century and plunged into
this 1949 book with considerable enthusiasm despite its
imposing length. As I read Braudel's attempt to integrate the
slow changes in the Mediterranean's geographic form, climate,
flora, and fauna with the faster alterations in human
socioeconomic relations and the specific wars, political
alterations, and other events of the 16th century, I struggled to
understand how these different layers of the account, which
were discussed in sections characterized by the variable speeds
of temporal process, fit together. At the time, I tried tracing
maps of human cultural features, such as cities and centers of
economic activity, over topographic maps in an effort to
integrate better the elements of Braudel's history. This work
produced nothing more than a visual mess, which also failed to
capture the considerable dynamism of Braudel's account.
Moreover, I repeatedly felt frustrated that I could not easily
examine particularly interesting segments of my visualizations
at a larger scale.
Many years
later, on a hot,
sleepless night
in Murcia,
Spain, in 1983,

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I used my
daughters'
tracing paper
and colored
pencils to try
this technique
again. This
time, I was
investigating
the
development of
a cohesive
oligarchy in
Fernand Braudel sought ways to shake historians
southeastern
into an awareness that they needed to focus on
Castile and
geography. The second edition of La Mediterranee
wanted to see,
(1966) featured a striking image designed by
literally, how
famed cartographer Jacques Bertin. Maps of the
my different
Mediterranean Sea often show how much of
types of data
Europe is only a tiny slice of North Africa. To
went together.
emphasize the importance of Africa to the
I was
Mediterranean, Bertin oriented the map toward the
particularly
south, showing Africa looming over the
interested in
Mediterranean with a relatively small Europe on
the evolution
the other side of the sea, much as this satellite
of social
image conveys this geographic relationship.
networks
(Image courtesy of NASA.)
among
individuals, families, and communities within a regional social
and cultural environment. Alas, even for this more spatially
restricted story, no useful result emerged from the tracings that
captured the dynamism and complexity of the processes
involved.
Again, after the passage of many years, when I told this story
during an online discussion of possible titles for Andre Gunder
Frank's 1998 book ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian
Age, I learned from other participants, Martin Lewis and Kren
Wigen, that a method existed to undertake the type of
visualization I had earlier attempted. They recommended that I
try GIS as an integration and visualization tool, and I
participated in my first GIS workshops with great aesthetic and
intellectual satisfaction.
It so happens that Frank's book, which focuses on the first
global age, 14001800 CE, formed part of a body of work
produced by Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others on
historic "world systems," which were geospatially large,
interconnected, dynamic entities of considerable complexity.
Although Frank rejected existing linear, civilizationalist, and
Eurocentric social science theories of historical development, as
well as his own pioneering work in economics on dependency
theory, he admitted that he did not know how to undertake the
type of data organization and analysis that would be necessary
to understand such complex systems. He, therefore, limited his
book to a path-breaking discussion of the world economy, for
which he received the inaugural Best Book prize of the World
History Association in 1999. Since early 1995, Frank had been
pushing me to figure out how such a comprehensive "holistic
global analysis" (his phrase) could be done. It increasingly
appeared to me that GIS, with its capacity for the aggregation
of data on the basis of geographic location and spatial analysis,
provided a tool for the work that Frank had wanted to do before
he died in April 2005.

GIS and Disciplinary Crisis

It is difficult to convey to readers of a written text a complex,
multidimensional history, even a linear one. Because such a

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high percentage of the human brain becomes engaged by visual

tasks, visualization must be a component of any account of this
type of historical system, and with its tie to cartographic forms
of representation, GIS visualizations can play a particularly
valuable role in increasing the understanding of geographically
vast subjects like the histories of major world regions or of the
world itself. For this reason, GIS offers great promise as a
means to develop high-quality classroom materials for history
teaching.
Therefore, beyond its integration, visualization, and analytical
potential, I began to look on GIS as the central piece of a
response to the serious and worsening crisis in which the
discipline of history had been enmeshed throughout my
teaching career. Through a failure to adapt, history surrendered
its place in a curriculum designed by Renaissance educators to
prepare students for humanitas, effective leadership. For 35
years, the discipline has suffered from a tight higher education
job market, the relatively low position of history departments in
the development plans of most colleges and universities, a lack
of appreciation by university administrators for the discipline's
traditional publication emphasis on the individually authored
monograph, and the growing weakness and instability of history
in K12 curricula. Over the past decade or more, the
disciplinary crisis has become dangerous because leaders of
four-year and graduate institutions have confronted a rapidly
changing U.S. higher education environment. Levels of federal
and state support have fallen, and public and private
institutions recognize limits on tuition increases to cover budget
shortfalls. Higher education cannot easily reduce expenditures
because students must be prepared to deal with constantly
shifting, globalized environments whose developments are
driven by rapid changes in communications and information
management.
The discipline will either contribute to the painful readjustment
of U.S. higher education that is currently under way, or history
departments will decline further in terms of resources and
internal administrative influence within their respective
institutions. In the midst of some institutional crises, existing
history departments may disappear as the remaining history
courses will be housed within other units, such as education,
which will undermine the discipline's contributions to critical,
research-oriented thought. It does not take much imagination
to envision education programs, without coherent history
departments, organized to produce teachers of the sort of
uncritical, "patriotic" K12 history curriculum advocated in the
1990s by some opponents of the national standards for U.S.
and world history. What solution does the use of GIS offer?

Collaboration and GIS

Leaders of the discipline of history have long resisted
collaborative forms of research, and they have been slow to
adopt contemporary communications and information
management technologies. Working alone, historians frequently
extract data from sources that are difficult and time-consuming
to discover and use, and thus, their research usually has a
relatively narrow geographic and temporal focus. As one result,
synthetic studies of cultural, institutional, and economic
evolution over long historical periods often badly distort reality
because this type of work has frequently been left to scholars
from other disciplines who are largely unfamiliar with the
nature, limitations, and uncertainty of the poorly structured,
fragmented, messy data used by historians in their individual
research. The failure to transform research practices and
graduate training has crippled the ability of historians to
respond effectively to major problems in world history and

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increasingly marginalized the discipline at major research

universities.
GIS offers historians who specialize in the histories of different
places and chronological periods an effective vehicle for
collaborative research among themselves and for involving
researchers from other disciplines. At any point in its work, a
research team can visualize its available data and decide what
additional information is required. Such research will often
produce and be based on digital, shared databases, archived in
public, online repositories, which will constitute a body of
knowledge capable of expansion and the correction of errors.
The cumulative results will allow us to better address the
complexity of history by melding diverse voices and stories and
a wide variety of sources. This capacity for collaborative work
will enable historians to join research teams able to submit
more ambitious proposals to a greater variety of funding
sources and will lead to jointly authored papers addressing a
broader range of problems and readers. By escaping their selfimposed disciplinary isolation, historians will enhance an
already dynamic discipline at the same time they will make
themselves an important part of the solutions to institutional
budget difficulties.

The Future of History at ISU

In response to these many factors, and to produce leaders for
this exciting future for historical research and teaching, the
History Department of Idaho State University (ISU) developed a
new internship- and GIS-based master's degree program in
geographically integrated history, known officially as the M.A. in
Historical Resources Management (MHRM). This appears to be
the first history program of its kind in the world (see the Fall
2005 ArcNews article on the program, "Idaho State University
Creates Innovative Program in History and GIS"), and it is one
of the fundamental building blocks of ISU's proposed
interdisciplinary Ph.D. in social dynamics and human
biocomplexity. These developments are supported by ISU's GIS
Center. Because the university has never had a geography
department, the center's director reports directly to the vice
president for research, and its oversight committee has
representatives from all interested academic units, including the
History Department.
During the
process of
creating the
master's
degree
program, we
transformed
our
undergraduate
Spatial, complex economic models, like this one of
history
a choppy-growth pattern, can be projected
curriculum to
cartographically. The bottom sheet shows
give it a
alternating growth and decline areas projected to
distinctly
a regional map. Adapted from T. Puu,
geospatial
Mathematical Location and Land Use Theory (2nd
focus. For
ed.; 2003: 276), with permission from the
example, we
publisher Springer Verlag.
may be the
only history department to state as a core objective that
students will understand cartographic design and maps as
historic sources. With the kind assistance of Waldo Tobler, I
introduced a course on this subject to history undergraduates in
the fall of 2006.
Although the first students only began their master's studies in

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August 2007, the program has already permitted the

department to submit major multiyear funding proposals to
support our own research and the educations of the master's
students and participating undergraduates. We have under
consideration a proposal for an ambitious multidisciplinary,
comparative study of the impact of public policy on rangeland
health in 20th-century Idaho, Mongolia, and Spain, and we are
in the preliminary proposal stage of a project to develop GISbased support for the high school U.S. history standards and to
train public school teachers for this type of teaching.
We are also part of a campus group that is preparing a funding
proposal for a temporal GIS. The National Science Foundation
(NSF) has provided $394,000 to support for three years my
participation and that of my graduate research assistants in a
large GIS-based, multinational, multidisciplinary, collaborative
research project entitled Dynamic Complexity of CooperationBased Self-Organizing Commercial Networks in the First Global
Age (DynCoopNet). I designed DynCoopNet to address a
program of the European Science Foundation's (ESF) European
Collaborative Research (EUROCORES) Scheme, The Evolution of
Cooperation and Trading (TECT), which was devised by
evolutionary biologists and economists. The DynCoopNet
collaborative research community investigates the evolution of
cooperation among merchants and between merchants and
other groups, with particular attention to the commercial
networks of importance to the global domains of Iberian
monarchies, 14001800 CE. In addition to the NSF support, I
also receive generous travel support from EUROCORES, and I
was named to the Scientific Committee, which will guide the
entire TECT program.
After years of administrative neglect and failure to provide the
History Department with necessary resources in the face of
greatly increased enrollments, our GIS activity has drawn
significant attention from ISU's administration. As one direct
consequence, my department received approval to hire Sarah
Hinman for a new position. She is a recent Ph.D. (of Louisiana
State University's Geography Department) who uses GIS to
study historic public health problems of U.S. cities. She will
provide us with significant support as we strengthen our
research and teaching programs. To help us maintain our
momentum, we have reason to hope that we will soon be
permitted to hire a historian of modern Europe with a strong
programming and GIS background and to receive support for
the graduate GIS teaching laboratory and classroom we have
designed.

Challenges for GIS

As exciting as these new triumphs and opportunities are, we
nonetheless recognize that there is much more to do to adapt
GIS to a discipline, such as history, for which time is significant.
I prefer to describe what we advocate as geographically
integrated history because we cannot be locked into the
questions and analytical techniques dictated by the available
GIS software. Yes, of course, there are applications and
combinations of applications that will take us partway down the
required paths of dynamic history. To make further progress,
though, it is clear that historians must concentrate on
developing, in collaboration with other disciplines, process
models that capture the importance of geospatial relationships
and variations.
Because of the importance of time to their discipline, historians
especially require a spatial-temporal GIS built on the basis of
mathematical models that will permit an evaluation of the fit
between data and theory, compensate for gaps in the data or

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m is s in g d a t a t & p e s ' a n d fa cilit a t e t h e a n a l& s is o f t h e e m e r g e n ce

of n e w fo rm s in co m p le ( s & s t e m s a n d of o ) * e ct / fie ld d & n a m ics '
s u ch a s t h e d iffu s io n of in n o+ a t io n s . , h e s e m od e ls m u s t ) e
a p p rop ria t e fo r d e a lin g w it h co m p le ( ' d & n a m ic' n on lin e a r
s & s t e m s ' w h ich a r e p ro ) a ) l& a g re a t d e a l m ore com m on t h a n
s im p le ' lin e a r o n e s ' a n d wit h t h e g e os p a t ia l a s p e ct s of t h e s e
s& ste m s.
, h e e ( is t in g for m s o f GIS + is u a li- a t io n u s u a ll& in + ol+ e s o m e
s o rt o f ca rt o g r a p h ic r e p re s e n t a t io n ' a n d t h e s e le n d t h e m s e l+ e s
we ll t o p re s e n t in g re s e a r ch r e s u lt s ' e n g a g in g t h e p u ) lic in
d is cu s s ion s ' a n d t e a ch in g . . s p a t ia l- t e m p ora l GIS s h ou ld a ls o
p ro + id e e ffe ct i+ e m e a n s o f + is u a li- in g t h e d & n a m ics of com p le (
s & s t e m s ) e ca u s e t h e + is u a li- a t ion s p rod u ce d ) & t h e
m a t h e m a t ica l e ( p re s s io n s u s e d t o m o d e l n on lin e a r d & n a m ics '
wh ile o ft e n a e s t h e t ica ll& p le a s in g ' a r e t oo d ifficu lt t o g ra s p for
p o lic& m a / e rs or ot h e r a u d ie n ce s w h os e m a t h e m a t ica l s / ills d o
n ot e ( t e n d t o p a rt ia l d iffe re n t ia l e 0 u a t ion s .
In e co n om ics ' ) o t h t h e s e con ce rn s ' n o n lin e a r d & n a m ics a n d
g e og ra p h ic s p a ce ' h a + e ) e e n m a rg in a li- e d in re ce n t d e ca d e s in
p re fe re n ce for s im p le r' lin e a r e con o m ic m od e ls ' wh ich o ffe r t h e
illu s ion o f co n fid e n t p re d ict a ) ilit & w it h o u t re fe re n ce t o
g e os p a t ia l + a r ia t io n s . . s a co n s e 0 u e n ce ' a ro u n d 1 1 1 0 ' le a d e r s
in t h e fie ld w e r e p re d ict in g t h e u n i+ e rs a l ) e n e fit s o f a g lo) a li- e d
e co n om & fro m w h ich a ll t h e p la n e t 2 s in h a ) it a n t s w ou ld e n * o&
in cre a s e d w e ll- ) e in g . 3 a n & o f t h e m h a + e ) e g u n t o re co g n i- e
t h e e rro r in t h e ir p r e d ict io n . If t h e & h a d u s e d n on lin e a r ' s p a t ia l
m od e ls ' t h e & wo u ld h a + e w a rn e d p olic& m a / e rs t h a t p u s h in g
lo ca ll& s t a ) le e co n om ie s in t o a w orld on e wo u ld li/ e l& p r od u ce
lo ca l ch a os ' re s u lt in g in e n + ir on m e n t a l d e g r a d a t io n ' fa m in e '
d is e a s e e p id e m ics ' wa rs ' a n d ot h e r for m s o f t e r ri) le h u m a n
s u ffe rin g w it h p la n e t a r& im p a ct s . 4 u t a t le a s t a n u m ) e r of
u s e fu l s p a t ia l m o d e ls a lre a d & e ( is t in e con o m ics ' a n d m a * o r
fig u re s co n t in u e t o d e + e lop t h e s e ' s u ch a s S w e d is h e con o m is t
, 5 n u Pu u o f 6 m e 7 6 n i+ e rs it & 2 s 8 e n t re fo r 9 e g io n a l S cie n ce .

GIS Research Opportunities

4 e ca u s e ot h e r s o cia l s cie n ce s ' e s p e cia ll& p o lit ica l s cie n ce a n d
s o cio lo g & ' h a + e re m a in e d m or e fa it h fu l t o t h e 1 1 t h - ce n t u r&
lin e a r t h e o rie s a r ou n d wh ich t h e & w e re d e + e lo p e d ' t h e n u m ) e r
of a + a ila ) le ' u s e fu l m od e ls ' w h ich ca n ) e e ( p re s s e d in
m a t h e m a t ica l t e r m s ' is m u ch m or e lim it e d . How e + e r' t h e r e a re
re s e a r ch e rs w or/ in g t o d e + e lo p s u ch m od e ls ' s u ch a s 3 ich a e l
S o n is o f t h e Ge og ra p h & : e p a rt m e n t of 4 a r - Ila n 6 n i+ e rs it & in
Is ra e l. He is writ in g a ) o o/ on t h e d iffu s ion o f in n o + a t ion s for
wh ich h e m od e ls s o cio lo g ica l t h e o rie s t o a ccou n t for t h e
d iffu s ion o f id e olo g ica l in n o+ a t ion s p rod u cin g ; a g g r e s s i+ e
in t ole ra n ce . ; . g re a t m a n & e ( cit in g re s e a r ch p os s i) ilit ie s a re
op e n t o h is t or ia n s in t e re s t e d in t h e n o n lin e a r d & n a m ics of
h u m a n e colog & ' s ocia l o rg a n i- a t io n ' a n d p o lit ica l in s t it u t io n s
a n d t h e in t e r p re t i+ e s ch e m e s of t h e cu lt u ra l e n + ir on m e n t t o
cr e a t e s u ch m o d e ls a n d t o GIS cie n t is t s in t e re s t e d in in t e g ra t in g
s u ch p r oce s s m o d e ls in t o GIS . 3 o re o+ e r' e ( ce p t t o a s s e rt t h e
s u p re m a c& of a < u ro p e a n p a t t e rn of d e + e lop m e n t a s t h e m od e l
for u n d e rs t a n d in g a n d ; m od e r n i- a t io n ' ; t h e s e 1 1 t h - ce n t u r&
s o cia l s cie n ce t h e o rie s a n d t h e ir 2 0 t h - ce n t u r & d e s ce n d a n t s
la r g e l& ig n o re d g e og ra p h ic d iffe re n ce s a n d s p a t ia l 0 u e s t io n s '
wh ich m e a n s t h a t t h e re is m u ch t h a t g e o g ra p h e rs ca n d o t o
e ( p a n d t h e h o ri- on s of t h e s o cia l s cie n ce s .
4 e ca u s e of h u m a n s 2 we a / co g n it i+ e ca p a cit & t o g ra s p s p a t ia l
re la t ion s h ip s ' it is h e lp fu l t o h is t oria n s t o m a / e ; s n a p s h o t s ; o f
t h e ir d a t a a t + a r io u s in t e r+ a ls in t h e h is t o ric ch ro n olog & ' a s we
d o n ow ' ) u t m o re m u s t ) e d o n e if GIS is t o fu lfill it s p rom is e for
h is t o rica l re s e a rch a n d t e a ch in g . His t oria n s re 0 u ire d is t in ct l&
t e m p ora l fo rm s of GIS a n d m u s t colla ) o ra t e w it h e ( p e rt s in

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GIS cie n ce a n d m a t h e m a t ica l m od e lin g . , h e : & n 8 oo p = e t p r o* e ct

of , < 8 , is a d d re s s in g t h e s e is s u e s .

Getting What Historians Want

In h is ) o o/ ReORIENT' > r a n / a rg u e s t h a t t h e h is t or& o f n o p la ce
ca n ) e a d e 0 u a t e l& u n d e rs t oo d w it h ou t in t e g ra t in g in t o t h e
a n a l& s is e n + ir on m e n t a l' e con o m ic' p o lit ica l- s ocia l' a n d cu lt u r a l
in fo rm a t ion a ) ou t it or t a / in g in t o a cco u n t h o w t h a t p la ce h a s
) e e n co n n e ct e d t o ot h e r p la ce s . . ll loca t io n s w e re p a r t s of
g e os p a t ia ll& la rg e s & s t e m s ' wh ich ' a ft e r t h e 1 ? t h ce n t u r& 8 < '
co n s t it u t e d a s in g le wo rld s & s t e m wh o s e d & n a m ics co n t in u ou s l&
s h a p e d w h a t h a p p e n e d in t h e s e p la ce s ' wh ile a t t h e s a m e t im e
lo ca l d e + e lop m e n t s in flu e n ce d s & s t e m ic p ro ce s s e s .
In 2 0 0 0 ' t h e a u t h ors o f t h e @ rg a n i- a t io n of . m e rica n His t o ria n s 2
LaPietra Report A ww w. o a h . o rg / a ct i+ it ie s / la p ie t ra / fin a l. h t m lB
e m p h a s i- e d t h a t ' fo r re a s o n s s im ila r t o > ra n / 2 s ' & o u ca n n ot
m a / e s e n s e of 6 . S . h is t or& w it h ou t t a / in g in t o a ccou n t t h e
wa & s in w h ich t h e cou n t r& h a s ) e e n lin / e d t o ot h e r p la ce s in
t h e wo rld a n d t h e ch a n g e s in t h e p a t t e rn o f t h o s e in t e ra ct io n s
o+ e r t im e .
In fa ct ' ) e ca u s e for t h o u s a n d s o f & e a rs m os t o f t h e w orld 2 s
p e op le h a + e ) e e n con n e ct e d t h ro u g h o u t la rg e g e og ra p h ic
re g ion s ' t h e h is t or& o f a n & p la ce ' in clu d in g la rg e co u n t rie s ' ca n
on l& ) e u n d e rs t o od ) & g r a s p in g h ow t h a t h is t o r& h a s ) e e n
s h a p e d ) & t h e w a & t h e p la ce h a s ) e e n co n n e ct e d t o ot h e r
p la ce s . S in ce t h e 1 ? t h ce n t u r & a n d t h e d e + e lop m e n t o f s o m e
s o rt o f t r u l& g lo) a l' d & n a m ic' n on lin e a r s & s t e m ' t h e h is t or ie s of
t h e p la ce s w it h in t h e s & s t e m h a + e ) e e n s h a p e d ) & t h e n a t u r e o f
t h e s & s t e m a n d t h e w a & t h e & h a + e ) e e n lin / e d t o it . , h e
co m m o n p r a ct ice of w rit in g a n d t e a ch in g h is t or& o n t h e ) a s is o f
t h e p o lit ica l ) ou n d a rie s o f m o d e rn cou n t rie s is a n t it h e t ica l t o
s u ch a con n e ct e d h is t or & ' a n d it will ) e n e ce s s a r& t o
co n ce p t u a li- e g e og r a p h ic re g ion s on t h e ) a s is o f a d d it io n a l
+ a r ia ) le s . 4 e ca u s e t h e s p a t ia ll& la rg e s & s t e m s h a + e u n d e rg on e
s & s t e m ic t ra n s for m a t io n s ' wh ich fu n d a m e n t a ll& a lt e r h u m a n
cu lt u r a l p e rce p t ion s a n d + a lu e s ' m o d e ls for u n d e rs t a n d in g
p ro ce s s wit h in on e h is t or ic s & s t e m ' e + e n o u rs ' m a & n ot ) e
e a s il& a d a p t a ) le t o ot h e r s .
, h e re fore ' t o cre a t e a GIS fo r d a t a o rg a n i- a t io n a n d
+ is u a li- a t io n t h a t is fu ll& u s e fu l for h is t o rica l re s e a rch a n d
t e a ch in g ' m a n & n e w m o d e ls w ill ) e re 0 u ire d ' a n d t h is d e m a n d
s h o u ld s t im u la t e re s e a rch ca p a ) le of p rofo u n d l& ch a n g in g a
n u m ) e r o f a ca d e m ic d is cip lin e s . In e ( p lo rin g t h e e + olu t ion o f
co op e ra t io n - ) a s e d co m m e r cia l n e t w or/ s in t h e firs t g lo ) a l a g e '
wh ich r e 0 u ire s u n d e rs t a n d in g t h e p a t t e rn o r fo rm o f t h e s e
n e t wo r/ e d in t e ra ct io n s a n d t h e p roce s s e s of a d & n a m ic'
n on lin e a r wo rld s & s t e m ' t h e : & n 8 oo p = e t p r o* e ct will cre a t e t h e
s p a t ia l- t e m p o ra l GIS t o im p la n t GIS a s a s ig n ifica n t com p o n e n t
of h is t or ica l re s e a r ch a n d t e a ch in g .

About the Author

C . 4 . ; C a c/ ; @ w e n s is p ro fe s s or o f h is t or& a t Id a h o S t a t e
6 n i+ e r s it & . He is t h e co cre a t o r o f IS 6 2 s GIS - ) a s e d m a s t e r 2 s
p ro g r a m in g e og ra p h ica ll& in t e g r a t e d h is t o r& ' t h e 3 . . . in
His t o rica l 9 e s ou r ce s 3 a n a g e m e n t . , h e 6 . S . = a t ion a l S cie n ce
> o u n d a t io n h a s fu n d e d h is wo r/ on t h e : & n 8 o o p = e t p ro * e ct fo r
t h re e & e a rs . @ w e n s 2 u n d e rs t a n d in g of com p le ( it & ' n o n lin e a r
d & n a m ics ' a n d t e m p o ra l GIS h a s ) e e n s h a p e d ) & re a d in g
p a p e r s ) & t h e co m p u t e r s cie n t is t s ' e con o m is t s ' g e o g r a p h e rs '
a n d m a t h e m a t icia n s o f t h e : & n 8 o op = e t re s e a r ch t e a m '
in clu d in g p r ofe s s o rs Pu u a n d S o n is A id e n t ifie d a ) o + e B a n d
p ro fe s s or s 3 o n ica Wa ch o wic- a n d 3 a & D u a n ' a n d h e wis h e s t o
t h a n / t h e m fo r t h e ir p a t ie n ce in re s p o n d in g t o h is e n d le s s
0 u e s t ion s a ) o u t t h e ir w or / .

http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/summer07articles/what-historians-want.html

13/08/2011

What Historians Want from GIS

Pgina 8 de 8

More Information
> o r a d d it ion a l in form a t ion ' con t a ct C . 4 . ; C a c/ ; @ w e n s ' His t o r&
: e p a rt m e n t ' Id a h o S t a t e 6 n i+ e r s it & A e - m a il:
ow e n * a c/ E is u . e d u B .

http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/summer07articles/what-historians-want.html

13/08/2011