Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History

4. Applying Historical GIS beyond the Academy: Four Use Cases for the Great Britain HGIS

92 Applying Historical GIS beyond the Academy: Four Use Cases for the Great Britain HGIS Humphrey R. Southall four Many historical GIS projects are the work of individual scholars, carried out in their own research time without external funding . Most of the projects that do receive external funding are relatively small scale, employing a single research assistant to work alongside the principal investigator. However, a small minority of HGIS research projects are among the most expensive projects of any kind in the arts and humanities. They are also more expensive than most nonhistorical academic projects using GIS technology. This is because the latter can use the vast bodies of georeferenced data describing the modern world that are available from national mapping agencies and through remote sensing . Conversely, even where historical maps are available, the historical researcher needs to scan, georeference, and probably vectorize them; and often spatial data need to be constructed from textual information containing geographical names, not coordinates. As a result, it is hard if not impossible to fund a major nationalHGIS, one that identifies every town and village and covers a century or more of change, with the kind of funding available for academic historical research. Total funding for the Great Britain HGIS now totals over $3.5 million, but obtaining this funding required us to demonstrate that the results would benefit an audience beyond academic history. This chapter describes how we have worked with four other groups to meet their needs: health researchers, archivists, government environmental agencies , and companies selling advice to the property sector. Four caveats are needed. First, the main focus is on the reasons for thecollaboration,withdetailsoftheactualresearchprovidedmainlyvia Applying Historical GIS beyond the Academy 93 references.Second,beveryclearthatourmainsourceoffundingremains grants, not commercial contracts, but the kind of evidence presented here, showing we were delivering wider economic and social benefits, has been crucial to obtaining grants. The other benefits of this kind of activity are further discussed in the conclusion. Third, the case studies presentedhereareofcoursealldrawnfromtheexperienceofoneproject, but that experience is quite diverse, and each case study ends with some more general lessons. Thefourthandpossiblythelargestcaveatisthatthecasestudieshere do not include the largest audience for our work, the users of our website , A Vision of Britain through Time, as originally funded by the UK National Lottery. Courtesy of Google Analytics, we can supply impressive statistics of raw volume, such as that the site was used by 1,811,265 different people (“unique users”) in the year from June 2012 to May 2013. However, because the site is completely open access, we know relatively little about who these people are and can only infer their motives. The available usage data are further analyzed in the third of three papers on ourrebuildingoftheGreatBritainHGIS,1 butthefocushereisonprofessional audiences we have worked closely with. Demography and Health Most national HGIS projects at least started with the goal of providing a framework for the analysis of historical census and vital registration data. This is certainly true of both the Great Britain HGIS and the U.S. National Historical GIS. Both projects not only created computerized boundariesforthemaindemographicreportingunitsbutalsoassembled large bodies of historical statistics. However, my aim here is not to review the very clear contribution of HGIS to historical demography but to explore what more needs to be done to make it useful to nonhistorical demographers, especially to contemporary medical researchers, and, more importantly, to explain why HGIS can make a large contribution to modern medical research. Twenty years or so ago, the growing number of retired people, especially those aged over eighty, produced near panic among policy makers in advanced societies because they were seen as an inevitable large 94 Humphrey R. Southall burden on health systems as well as pension funds. It is now recognized that many people have a healthy old age, requiring constant care only in the final months of life, but this has led to a new emphasis on research into the factors deciding who will experience healthy old age and how the proportion of such people can be increased. This has become linked to medical research that has demonstrated a strong relationship betweenwhathappenstopeoplebeforetheyarebornandininfancyand their health much later in life. This research began with a classic study by David Barker into the relationship between a baby’s nourishment, as recorded by weight at birth and subsequently, and the risk of death from coronary heart disease.2 More recent research into the “Barker hypothesis ” has explored the wider impact of deprivation in infancy.3 Such...