Historical GIS Research in Canada ed. by Jennifer Bonnell, Marcel Fortin (review)

This is the second anthology in the University of Calgary Press’s new series, Canadian History and Environment, and one that significantly raises the bar for practitioners. Gorgeously illustrated, the oversize volume does enviable justice to the quality of research and analysis between its covers. The book is a bold assertion of the importance of digital technology in historical scholarship and of recent efforts to grapple with the spatial dimensions of historical change. Readers unfamiliar with the specifically Canadian narratives will nevertheless find rich comparative material to think about how spatial questions alter historical narrative and periodization, even if not all of the authors make the effort to draw international comparisons. The contributors each bring varying skill levels to the use of geographic information systems for historical scholarship, and uninitiated readers will find as much to intrigue them as will more advanced historical geographers. The volume serves both as a good introduction to spatial thinking and sources and as a primer on some of the more advanced applications of the technology.

The collection is designed as a showcase but achieves something more. For the dedicated reader, the case study approach is a welcome departure from larger thematic treatments, particularly those that strip geographic or community context from an understanding of social change. Despite recent interest in visualizing large data sets across space, the geographic palate in this book feels richer because of the layering of information achieved in each of the case studies. As several of the contributors illustrate, the dramatic increase in the resolution of analysis, moving from cityscape to street corner, watershed to shoreline, or landscape to individual land parcel, within an integrated digital geographic data set, conveys the pivotal importance of context, unexpected variations across space, and new perceptions of human agency at each scale. Patterns that appear smoothed and abrupt at a coarser scale of observation are surprisingly diverse when examined at the street corner, fence post, or water’s edge. There is an interesting tension in several of the chapters between postmodernist sensibilities and empiricism, no doubt a product not only of the interdisciplinary nature of the collection but also of the shift toward, or return to, computation by social historians.

The environmental dimensions of the scholarship loom largest in this collection. It is the focus of several of the most engaging chapters addressing environmental change in Toronto’s Don River Valley, Ottawa’s urban forest, Kamouraska’s salt marshes, and Prince Edward Island’s farms and forests. Using a combination of historical maps, aerial photographs, manuscript census, and inventory data, the chapters present century-long, or longer, examinations of how forests have declined and re-emerged and how anthropogenic river valleys and shorelines are barometers of change in the larger society. For readers interested in pursuing similar approaches, each chapter nicely blends explication of the research questions, the source materials, and the accuracy and limitations of the analysis. Primarily intended as histories of environmental process – the human actors remain further offstage in these chapters – the examination of the ebb and flow of conditions on the landscape and in the watersheds defies the kind of linear narrative familiar to most historians.

The themes of race, inequality, ethnicity, movement, and exclusion are the focus of fascinating chapters on race and Chinese immigration, race and residence in Victoria, religious adherence in Toronto, land allocation on the Kahnawá:ke reserve, and the rebuilding of Montreal after the fire of 1852. The tension between exclusion and agency is well expressed in the title of Sally Hermansen and Henry Yu’s chapter, “The Irony of Discrimination.” The chapter by John Lutz, Patrick Dunae, Jason Gilliland, Don Lafreniere, and Megan Harvey on the locations and destinations of Chinese Canadians suggest new research agendas for understanding the migration experience in Canada. Moving beyond mere recognition of racism’s centrality in the Canadian experience, both chapters point to a research agenda focused on the choices made by Chinese immigrants in...