Visualizations are a critical part of all Digital Humanities projects. Intended to gather vast quantities of data and translate them into understandable figures and easy to breakdown databases of collected and curated information, the widespread growth of interest in GIS, geographic information systems, applications shows how the ‘spatial turn’ is becoming an important part of how the growing digital world is permeating the field of history.

According to Anne Kelly Knowles, the ‘spatial turn’ is the growing interest of the social sciences in analyzing human geography using a variety of geographical analysis methods (Knowles, 452). In History, maps are a necessary part of research and have been used in the past as a means of orienting oneself in historical events and time periods. Using GIS data gathered from national and international mapping systems, like NASA, historical maps can be used as more than simply images or figures that show how historical actors viewed their world. Rather it can be a tool that is checked against modern geographical data to verify historical accounts and in some cases make arguments in history by examining never before seen patterns within the geographical data itself.

In Richard White’s paper defining Spatial History, White focuses on the meaning of space as places with meaning ascribed to it by human behavior and activity. While this is a rather humanistic approach to the definition, it is important for historians because of the attachment to human behavior and agency within the scope of human geography. White mentions that by using spatial history, historians can measure the meanings behind different parts of human activity. From large maps depicting mass movements of people through migrations, to the navigation of small spaces like kitchens GIS is the perfect avenue for conducting this research (White, 2).

The application of using GIS and quantitative data in history follows the pattern of the field in continuing to push for more seemingly scientific approaches and methods to historical scholarship. History has begun examining historical spaces using emerging technologies and geographical data in a way that shows human activity as points in a data set that can be converted into visual data on maps by examining everything from settlement patterns, social networks, alterations of demographics, and more. These techniques allow for historians to convert large amounts of historical data into easy to quantify and understand figures. Of course, I use the term “easy to understand” lightly because as Knowles even mentions, converting qualitative data into quantifiable points is a complicated task wrought with potential pitfalls and blind spots (Knowles, 464). The criticisms of GIS historical mapping focus on the use of GIS as a means to simply quantitate data and shows how technology’s development is still unable to produce adequate conclusions that can withstand academic scrutiny, especially when trying to use logical conclusions to discuss topics of human agency (Knowles, 464).

Spatial history is a new way of examining historical actors within the contexts of their own world. With today’s growing technological abilities bringing together the past with the digital globalized world offers a chance for wider audiences to engage in immersive reconstructions of historical events and time periods in ways no one has explored before. While there are limits to GIS applications whether because of researcher’s technological know-how or a lack of publicly available and accessible data, I believe that converting the growing digitized historical and archaeological record and examining it spatially is an important step in trying to grasp some sense of understanding from the ‘big data’ we have discussed in previous weeks. Spatial history offers a chance at trying to understand and interact with large sets of sources that would have previously been impossible to sift through.

A perfect example of this is the Dust Bowl. Having been born and raised in Kansas myself I know the geographical layout of the area affected by the Dust Bowl very well. As mentioned in Geoff Cunfer’s article on ‘Scaling the Dust Bowl’ nowadays it’s possible to examine the historical records from all of the counties in Kansas rather than being limited to a case study of two counties in the 1970s (101-102). Although this information was incredible for its time, by examining the entire Great Plains region and the records from more than two counties over a larger period of time one can see the relationship between “human activity and natural phenomena,” in a way that showed the drought and dust storms of the 1930s as part of a larger pattern that could be used to monitor weather and drought patterns in future decades (Cunfer, 108-109).

Cunfer, Geoff. “Scaling the Dust Bowl,” in Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship. ESRI Press, 2008, 95-121.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. “Historical GIS: The Spatial Turn in Social Science History.” Social Science History 24, (Fall, 2000): 451-470.

White, Richard. “What is Spatial History.” Stanford University Spatial History Project, Spatial History Lab, Working Paper, 2010.