Welcome to The Geospatial Humanities, an open educational resource led by Dr. Joshua MacFadyen, Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Geospatial Humanities and Director of the lab for Geospatial Research in Atlantic Canadian History (the GeoREACH Lab) at the University of Prince Edward Island. The project is designed to walk humanities students and other scholars through a variety of geospatial tools and research methods. Volume I is an e-textbook by lead author Dr. MacFadyen and co-authors Drs. Benjamin Hoy and Jim Clifford. Dr. Hoy is Director of the Historical GIS Lab at the University of Saskatchewan, and Jim Clifford is Associate Professor in History at the University of Saskatchewan. The GeoREACH Lab and the HGIS Lab are dedicated to training students and supporting scholarship in the broader area of geospatial humanities. Previous collaborations between the groups included GIS lessons for the Programming Historian and historical data development for national and international research projects.[1] Other key contributors to Volume I include D. Bailey Clark, an undergraduate research assistant at the GeoREACH Lab, Kim Mears, a librarian and Open Educational Resource program director, and Megan MacDonald, a student assistant at UPEI’s Robertson Library.

Geospatial Humanities Volume I focuses on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and particularly the open source, multiplatform and free QGIS software. QGIS is a user friendly tool capable of creating publishable maps and analyzing complex datasets . Each chapter provides a hands-on tutorial to guide readers through five of the core GIS exercises that are frequently performed by historians. Those processes include (1) software installation and navigation, (2) choosing the symbology of data , (3) georeferencing primary source maps, (4) digitization – creating new GIS data based on primary sources – and (5) map design and cartography. Each tutorial is designed to build on the one before it, although readers who are already familiar with the basics of GIS may jump ahead to later chapters.

This short introduction to Volume I discusses the concepts and practices of the geospatial humanities, with a focus on historical research and the evolution of the geospatial technology most frequently used by historians – GIS. We offer this brief overview of the interdisciplinary practices of geospatial history in order to prepare students with the background they need to proceed through the lessons in Volume I. Each chapter also includes discussions of the basic theoretical concepts necessary to use GIS with confidence. The chapters also include periodic stories in the sidebars that describe how scholars of varying skill levels have used these tools to answer historical questions.

After this introduction you will find five chapters containing detailed tutorials for five fundamental GIS processes. Chapter 1 will show you how to install and operate QGIS to make your first map. All tutorials will require the use of QGIS, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that is available to all users. Along with the proprietary (i.e., pay-for-use) software ArcGIS, QGIS is one of the most popular GIS programs available to scholars today.

We have focused on QGIS because it  is accessible. It is free, available in forty languages, and runs well on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. QGIS is also widely supported. It contains extensive documentation, and a large online community of volunteers respond quickly with friendly advice and solutions to specific problems. When students leave university, they do not lose access to the GIS software.

While this tutorial was designed to be completed on a Windows desktop computer, it is possible to conduct these exercises on a Mac with minimal differences in the installation process and attention to the differences in how the different operating systems store data.

This e-textbook should be easy to read on any browser or mobile device. All of the images contain detailed alt-text for accessible reading. For those who prefer to read the book as an e-book please return to the book’s home page and click the download button for a variety of options. To navigate this e-textbook in a browser, please click on the Contents button on the left to see each chapter and its main sections. On mobile devices the contents will usually appear at the top of each page. You may also click the links at the bottom of your browser to move forward to the next section of this introduction. Pressing the right or left keys on your keyboard will perform the same action, for those reading this on a personal computer. For instance, the next section should appear on the bottom right under “Getting Started.”

Introduction to Geospatial Humanities

The ubiquity of digital maps and GIS

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have infiltrated our lives over the past twenty years. On election night we watch the maps change dynamically on television as electoral results are reported. Linking map symbols (electoral districts) with data (election results) is the key feature of GIS software. Most of us have smart phones with digital mapping applications. These are GIS apps that link points, lines and polygons (the three main types of vector data you will learn about) with other types of data such as the website link for a business or the hours of a restaurant. That is GIS. These programs link data together combining locations with other kinds of data, such as names, dates, statistical data, descriptions, textual quotes, photographs, audio recordings and just about anything else. The only difference with QGIS, is you will learn how to build this yourself.

Two decades ago, professors and librarians warned history graduate students to think hard before using GIS in their research projects. The software was cumbersome to install, hard to learn, and was not designed to explore change over time. As we write this in 2022, those warnings are less and less applicable.

GIS software is no more difficult to learn than a common spreadsheet program like Excel. It is easy to create basic maps. In fact, you will be making basic maps within the first chapter of this book. And it is very powerful. Like Excel, the power of GIS goes far beyond the basics introduced here in Volume I. Learning QGIS will set you up to use other GIS software and online cloud platforms. All digital mapping systems use the same basic concepts and approaches. The data you use (and create!) are usually compatible with other systems including ESRI’s ArcGIS Pro and StoryMaps. Finally, QGIS is a great gateway to other more advanced digital humanities methods. As you get comfortable with the material in this book, you can start to expand your skills with a programming language like Python or with SQL databases, both of which are working in the background of QGIS.

What is geospatial history/humanities?

Geospatial history is a methodology focused on understanding how events unfold across time as well as across geography. In practice, geospatial history (also referred to as Spatial History or Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS)) is a flexible and wide-reaching approach. HGIS has been used to study everything from food gathering strategies, and environmental change, to racism and historic violence.[2]

Geospatial humanities projects are often defined by a series of common characteristics.

1. The projects are digital in focus, often requiring the use of specialized software (spreadsheets, programming languages, data visualization software, etc.) in order to visualize, understand, and interpret the final conclusions. In recent years, this software has become far more accessible. With as little as two weeks of training in QGIS, it is possible to create a simple custom-built map that shows the location of the cities discussed in your article or chapter.
2. The projects often require teamwork. This teamwork may occur directly (team members working alongside one another and sharing technical expertise) or indirectly (a scholar drawing on datasets, scanned historical maps, or other digital assets created by others).
3. The final product often appears, at least in part, as a visualization (a custom-built map) to see patterns that would be otherwise invisible in the data. This is accomplished through the process of combining, layering, manipulating, and omitting data created from different primary sources.[3]
4. The datasets created by a geospatial project operate as both a piece of the evidence and a publishable product. Unlike traditional historical endeavors where only the finished write-up (a book or article) is published, geospatial humanists also publish their underlying datasets. The user guides that accompany large datasets are sometimes longer than the articles that spawned them, emphasizing the importance of high quality documentation when sharing research material. While geospatial historians have not abandoned publishing books or articles, they have also begun to  explore alternative (often digital) publishing venues that allow information to be displayed interactively combining both the original dataset and the interpretation in a single place.[4]
5. Because large scale digitization projects are so time consuming to create, most geospatial historians share their data freely with one another to minimize the need to duplicate efforts.[5] This requires proper citation and credit and we hope overtime scholars will be recognized for the impact of their data as well as they published articles and books.
6. Finally, geospatial projects allow for the exploration of absences and counterfactuals. By mapping the location of key features (eg. industries or officials), it becomes possible to see where they are absent at a glance. This can help clarify problems in the archive or problems in the ways the original information had been collected in ways that are not always possible through textual analysis.

Geospatial tools and approaches are employed across many humanities and social sciences disciplines. Although our lessons are tailored for historians in particular, we recognize that  scholars from a wide array of disciplines will benefit from them , so we often use the term “Geospatial Humanities” rather than “geospatial history” to describe the field as a whole.

How has GIS Technology Developed?

The history of geographic information systems is long and complex. Automated computing existed long before the arrival of digital computers. By the 1880s, statisticians and government officials like Francis Amasa Walker were already collecting, tabulating, and mapping millions of data points related to the American censuses.[6] However, they faced enormous challenges with the rapidly growing population, and in 1888 the US Census Bureau invited proposals for a mechanical device that could tabulate census data. The winner was a census employee named Herman Hollerith. He proposed a machine that used punch card techniques similar to the cards used to store and input weaving patterns in Jacquard looms. The data machine was so successful that it was used to help process the 1890 census, and Hollerith founded a company that built similar machines for businesses. By 1924 the company had merged and changed its name to International Business Machines (IBM).[7]

An early example of the historical maps the American Census Bureau were creating in the 1890s. Together these maps tracked the growth of the American population (excluding Indigenous people) between 1870 (left) and 1890 (right). The darker the color the more people residing in the area[8]

In the interwar period, a series of innovations led to the development of new computers. At first they remained analog and then, during the Second World War, they adopted electrical relays and binary data formats. Giant electromechanical computers such as IBM’s Harvard Mark I and Alan Turing’s “Bombe” in Bletchley Park processed enormous quantities of data for the allied war effort and established the theoretical and mechanical foundations for post-war “mainframe” computers.[9] Universities adopted and used mainframes from the beginning, and humanists such as Father Roberto Busa were early adopters. However, digital computing was so expensive and time consuming that it remained inaccessible to most scholars, and computers were not yet equipped to take tabular data and plot it on maps.

Government and industry continued to process unprecedented quantities of geospatial data in the mid twentieth century, and both cartographers and information scientists searched for ways to leverage these technologies to create maps. In the 1960s, the Canadian Federal government produced the first GIS as part of its much older Canada Land Inventory program dedicated to rationalizing the nation’s extensive lands and other natural resources. The program hired geographer and aerial surveyor Roger F. Tomlinson to develop a computerized system that could store and map Canada’s land use data. Tomlinson completed his plan in 1962 and named it a geographic information system. With federal resources Tomlinson directed a team from IBM and the Ottawa based Spartan Air Services and completed the Canada GIS in the mid 1960s.[10]

The concepts and computational power for GIS was established by the 1960s, but other digital improvements were required before the technology could come into general use. Computer processing power, data storage, and modeling techniques all improved rapidly in the decades since the first GIS. The rise of personal computers in the 1980s made geospatial analysis possible for a much wider range of scholars, and the rapid expansion of the internet in the 1990s brought together new communities of scholars from across the environmental humanities who were interested in GIS and geospatial methods.[11]  Scholars in the social sciences began to explore the technology in earnest in the late 1990s thanks to professional groups such as the Social Science History Association (SSHA).[12] Although these disciplines explored new tools in new communities, many of the geospatial research methods they brought to the table had been established generations earlier. For every humanities scholar dabbling in or dedicated to GIS, there were many more using analog methods in the field of historical geography and related disciplines.

Who were the Scholarly Innovators?

Historical geography predates the advent of desktop GIS software and many of the cartography conventions discussed in this e-textbook were developed using analog methods. Books and historical atlases from the mid-twentieth century included maps visualizing census data or changing land use over time. And whole fields of history focused on geographical issues, including Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, the Annales school or the wide reaching influence of Harrold Innis’s Staples thesis and Donald Creighton’s Metropolitan thesis.[13] So it might be tempting to see what some historians call the recent “spatial turn” as simply introducing computers to what historians and geographers were already doing. However, desktop GIS software, introduced in the mid 1990s, did fundamentally change the humanities and social sciences. The ability to explore spatial data during the research process and create visualizations on the fly created dramatic new opportunities for analysis. Instead of creating maps at the end of the project for publication, we can now create maps early in our research and use the results to prompt new questions that require further archival research to answer. GIS software created a new systematic way to read historical maps and layer information from different source material. The iterative nature of this process created the new practice of spatial history. We must now turn to the early innovators to see the importance of HGIS methods that developed during the late 1990s.

William Cronon used a mapping component of a new statistical software in the 1980s to map bankruptcy data from the late nineteenth century to show the primacy of Chicago in the American West.[14] This work predated the early desktop GIS software by a few years, but it demonstrated the new power of using maps to explore quantitative history. In the decade that followed, numerous teams began creating large quantitative databases tracking the Transatlantic Slave Trade[15] and national censuses for large countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and China.

In Canada, GIS was used by a relatively small group of historians and historical geographers starting in the 1990s. The most notable was the Montréal, l’avenir du passé (MAP), a geospatial database that allowed geographer Sherry Olson, historian Robert Sweeny, and other scholars uncover new patterns in the history of Canada’s largest city.[16] Anne Kelly Knowles brought researchers together and produced four special issues and edited collections published between 2000 and 2008.[17] The vast majority of this early work focused on GIS software’s strengths of and connected quantitative databases with spatial data (census tracks with population data). This often involved large teams with significant funding and it took years of data and infrastructure development before they started publishing results. But this work did result in some major revisionist theories. Our colleague, Geoff Cunfer, for example, amassed data on the Dust Bowl that confirmed a drought was significantly more important than tractors, farmers and capitalism in causing the dust storms. GIS allowed him to broaden the analysis from geographically restricted case studies to the whole southern great plains. At this scale, it was clear there was limited correlation between the percentage of the land under cultivation and the dust storms, while the drought data matched closely with maps of the storms.[18]

What are the Recent Approaches to HGIS?

In the past fifteen years, the use of GIS in history has expanded significantly with a number of important developments when compared with the first generation of scholarship. GIS is no longer limited to big research teams with large budgets. Graduate students have used GIS to explore urban morphology as it relates to a small river, a single map of a Mohawk community, or to identify the spread of post offices across the west in Canada and the United States.[19] Secondly, historians have moved beyond the census and other quantitative sources. They have found many new ways to read and interpret historical maps. Historians have used oral histories to gather spatial information.[20] And a number of projects have used text mining methods to create spatial data out of large collections of digitized historical documents.[21] The internet has also created alternative ways to share research results. Interactive online atlases allow visitors to explore the visualizations, and platforms like StoryMaps allow researchers to create history websites to share their findings with the public. The American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History is the best current example.[22] Finally, while the cost of GIS software and the funding opportunities limited most of the work to North America, Western Europe and China, the field has begun to extend to the rest of the world with recent publications from the Global South, including articles focused on India and Nigeria.[23]

The field has grown to the point where it is now difficult to survey the literature, and more and more historians simply use GIS or other digital mapping platforms in their research without publishing standalone articles on their methods. Nevertheless, there are a number of bibliographies that try to maintain lists of historical GIS publications and a growing number of websites with shared historical GIS datasets.[24]

Where are the datasets?

As the tutorials in this volume demonstrate, historical GIS projects rely on a combination of recent geographic reference data and historically-specific geospatial data. Within the latter, scholars use their own specific datasets as well as generic data (eg. spatial boundaries and other geographic features) that could be used by anyone studying one place in a similar historical period. But most projects are made easier and more geographically accurate when historical datasets are used in conjunction with spatially enabled databases that show modern features. For example, accessing a modern GIS boundary file for the province of PEI is a great way to ensure that historical map layers of the island are appearing in the right part of the world, at the right scale, and using map projections that have already been created by skilled cartographers (more on projections in Chapter 3). There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Modern geographic reference data are typically created by government-employed cartographic teams such as municipalities or census officials. Almost immediately after civic data are created they become of interest to historians, and since many have spatial components they may be analyzed in a historical GIS. Some municipalities have even created historically relevant GIS data, and several Canadian provinces have been very open with their historical data including Ontario and Prince Edward Island.

For the most part, the general-interest historical datasets have been developed at the national levels. Large multi-institution teams of historians, economists, geographers, library scientists and other disciplines came together to seek funding (usually from national agencies) and agree on a methodology and approach for creating these datasets. Some of the earliest examples were the Great Britain Historical GIS (GBHGIS) used by the Visions of Britain project, the US National Historical Geographic System (NHGIS) project, and the China Historical GIS project.[25] Since then, there have been national-level GIS data developed in Germany, France, Poland, and other European countries.

GIS boundary files are often created to align with nationally significant historical data, particularly historical censuses. In Canada the CCRI and the Canadian Peoples Project developed robust and freely available census boundary files that may be linked to decennial censuses in each year from 1851 to 1951.[26] The Canadian Historical GIS web portal allows users to “explore, map, and download statistical information about every place in Canada as the nation expanded through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Users can dynamically generate, explore, map, and download data about population, ages, housing, national origin, agriculture, fisheries, and other topics.” To read more and to access the maps from 1851-1921 visit https://hgiscanada.usask.ca.

Statistics Canada’s boundary files are available from 1981 to 2021. See the “Geospatial data & maps” section for each census year on the University of Toronto Map & Data Library’s Census of Canada – general documentationwebsite. Each team faces a range of limitations and challenges, of course, and they make decisions about which periods and sources fall within their scope. As a result, it is important for scholars to discover which periods are covered by historical boundary files, and if they are not (for example, Canada in 1971) is it worth creating new boundary files for your project?

Key Tips: Before you Begin

Keep it Simple

Start simple. While the most basic maps can be built with minimal technical skills and in a short amount of time, large scale projects can take months or years to complete and may require a team of researchers.

Build on Existing Work

Often the hardest part of a mapping project is gathering the initial information. Using existing resources is one of the best ways to start out. This allows you to focus your efforts on the map creation process rather than on digitizing extensive resources.

Build Your Community

The historical GIS community is large, diverse, and welcoming. Many scholars are willing to provide you with tutorials, datasets, and other supports if you describe the challenges you are encountering. Chances are good that other communities are interested in your project, too, either in the exact location or in similar approaches in different locations. Try proposing your work to historical conferences, and watch for the H-GIS network’s call for papers for the annual SSHA conference. Tap into listservs and social media networks to see if there are others with similar and complementary project ideas; they may be interested in sharing ideas or even joining you at one of the conferences in a thematic panel you design and propose together.

Conclusion

This introduction has briefly defined the geospatial humanities and summarized some of the key developments in geospatial history. We hope you enjoy the tutorials that follow, and we trust you will soon be a geospatial historian if you aren’t already! The rest of this e-textbook contains five extensive chapters, sidebars, key concepts, and many images to guide you through each lesson. Remember to click the Contents section on the left to see each chapter and its sections, or click the link at the bottom right of your browser to continue to Chapter 1. It should read “Next: Getting Started.”