Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS & Spatial History ed. by Ian N. Gregory and Alistair Geddes (review)

A number of collections have shown how a spatial perspective and, more specifically, the technology for spatial analysis and visualization can be applied to the study of society and culture. The six essays in this volume all make use of geographic information system (gis) technology and all are concerned with tracing change over time. The articles’ reliance on this technology supports the claim that the spatial humanities as a field are defined by the use of geographical technologies (xv). Nevertheless, the more fundamental development is the interest in bringing a geographical perspective to bear on historical change. Combining basic kinds of geographical information—location (where something happens) and distance (the relationship of that location to other locations)—with human events creates new insights. Without doubt, gis has been integral to this development because it has made cartography so easy. Gregory’s bibliography of further readings offers a broad perspective and a reliable introduction. At the more sophisticated levels illustrated by the chapters in this collection, the power of gis lies in its ability to process large amounts of data at different scales using statistical methods and visualization techniques. Most importantly, gis is an invaluable tool for discovering the relationships between different kinds of locatable data.

Robert M. Schwartz and Thomas Thevenin’s comparison of English and French localities is a good case in point. How did the spread of railroads through the countryside affect agricultural production at a time when cheaper American grain was disrupting the existing cereals market? To answer this question, Schwartz and Thevenin use population data, land-use history, land elevations, and railroad-station locations. Distance was crucial; upland farmers further from stations reduced cereal production and increased their cow herds, whereas those with closer access to cheap rail transportation were less likely to do so.

Historical gis studies often depend on being able to track population through repeated changes in the administrative boundaries used to aggregate population statistics. Andrew A. Beveridge’s study of urban black—white segregation from 1880 to 2010 in Chicago, and Niall Cunningham’s investigation of the Catholic—Protestant division in Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century, with special attention to deaths during the Troubles, are examples of what is feasible once this problem is solved. For Beveridge, U.S. census tracts solved the problem, but Cunningham had to use both nineteenth-century baronies and twentieth-century urban and rural districts. Both studies use statistical techniques to show how the isolation or clustering of their respective groups changed over time, and they show similar arcs, from increasing segregation in the past to decreases in the present.

The fine-grained use of population data depends upon knowing the boundaries of population-containing units, a serious problem for research about periods prior to the advent of mathematical mapping at the end of the eighteenth century. Elijah Meeks and Ruth Mostern demonstrate that point locations—in this case the shifting locations of country and prefectural seats in eleventh-century China—can offer insight into how the state balanced its interest in revenue with its strategic concerns at the borders and how it responded to such natural disasters as the Yellow River’s change of course in 1048.

From the editors’ perspective, Meeks and Mostern’s territorial analysis and Julia Hallam and Les Roberts’ mapping of Liverpool in film represent a turn from historical gis to spatial humanities. Even though these studies are not as statistical as those previously mentioned, however, the notion that they represent a turn from the quantitative to the qualitative or from historical gis to the spatial humanities is unconvincing. After all, both of them depend on exhaustive datasets and precise locations in space. There are humanistic approaches to space and place that require neither kind of evidence. We also should ask whether a gis-based approach would have offered insights that other, less laborious methods, do not. A traditional content analysis would seem to...