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ECAI Session 5 - Historical GIS

Lewis Lancaster Chair

Rain Simar, "Medieval German Shrines and the Reformation: A Geographic Information System"

In Lionel Rothkrug’s article “Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation” in the series, “Historical Reflections,” Dr. Rothkrug theorizes that the Reformation came about because religious practices and beliefs, dating from antiquity, set the stage long before the 16th century reformation events.

Using Rothkrug’s collected data on shrines in Germany dating from before 1000 C.E. to 1530 CE, I have created a GIS to demonstrate and test his theory that we can see the patterns of specific religious practices and beliefs in the types of shrines that were erected in certain regions, and that those patterns in turn, influenced whether or not the region was likely to embrace Protestantism.

Creating a GIS based on gathered information from his text and other sources gives a visual spatial perspective of his theory, and allows one to analyze the data and draw conclusions as to the merit of his theory.

Irina Merzliakova, Merrick Lex Berman, and Alexei Karimov, "From Tibet to Altai: Place Names of Western China on Old Russian Maps"

The Russian Archives keep a great amount of maps and corresponding papers of military agents and travelers for the Western China, especially for the second half of the XIX century. Great interest of the Russian cartographers to this vast region is explained by state political ambitions, economic interest to develop profitable trade, scientific interest.

Our aim is to build the publicly available catalog of these sources and create georeferenced dataset of the historical place names features extracted from large- and medium-scale maps. Usage of the common standards for metadata creation (CSDGM, FGDC-STD-001-1998), the ADL Feature Type Thesaurus, approaches developed by the China Historical GIS ensure compatibility of our datasets with already created products.

By today the short list of sources from only Moscow archives presents about sixty Russian maps. Among them original maps of the expeditions of N.M. Przhevalskii, P.K. Kozlov, K.I. Bogdanovich, M.V. Pevtsov, V.I. Roborovskii, various military surveys. There are route surveys with the detailed descriptions, instrumental topographic surveys of large areas showing populated places, historical sites, physiographic features.

The sample georeferenced dataset presents place names for the section of the Southern Tibet (beginning of XX century), compiled on materials of the Russian and British geographical societies. Being built in ArcView environment it was verified according to the DCW base map and includes Russian and Romanized Name equivalents. Together with other datasets and photos of the most interesting sources this will be the multilingual contribution to the CHGIS. We plan to publish materials on the Web for free academic use.

Kim Heung-kyu, Choe Young-joon, Kim Jong-hyuk, Jung Chi-young, Sin Hang-su, "Compilation of the Administrative Atlas of the Chosun Dynasty (1392-1910)"

Our project is to compile the Electronic Cultural Atlas of the Chosun dynasty. As the first fruit of our continuing efforts, we present here the administrative atlas of the Chosun period. This is the first time that the complete Chosun administrative atlas has been reconstructed. It includes all 330 prefectures and districts and covers the area of more than 220,000 ㎢. By making available the valuable experience gained in compilation of the historical administrative atlas, we hope for active exchange of information and expertise with the ECAI Projects in other countries.

Merrick Lex Berman, "Time - Differentiated Datasets for Chinese Historical Administrative Units"

After developing a China-wide dataset for the year 1820, the CHGIS project has been working on production of time-differentiated datasets, going backwards in time to the earliest available records wherever possible. The new temporal datasets are being produced region by region, starting with the southeast coastal area and moving north and northwest to the Central China plain. Currently we have finished draft versions of all administrative district changes for the areas overlapping modern Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and parts of Anhui, Shandong and Hebei. This presentation will use ECAI TimeMap software to demonstrate browsing and searching of the time-differentiated datasets, and will introduce the CHGIS simplified spatio-temporal data model, and the methodology for temporal-coding of "fuzzy" date values.

David Bodenhamer, "The North American Religion Atlas"

Few scholars have worked effectively with both the religious and geographical diversity that is a hallmark of the United States, in large measure because the ability to manage the spatial and temporal character of this diversity has been lacking. GIS provides one solution, as seen in this web-based, interactive atlas of American religious adherence for the 20th century. This session will feature a demonstration of the Atlas, an exemplary ECAI project, and a discussion of its potential for scholarship.

Ian Gregory and Paul Ell, , "The Great Britain Historical GIS"

The Great Britain Historical GIS is one of the best developed national GIS databases. It contains a wide variety of census, vital registration and other statistical information published in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are linked to a temporal GIS containing the changing administrative boundaries used to publish these data allowing the researcher to create a snapshot of a source at any point in time. A variety of sophisticated interpolation methodologies have also been devised that allow data from different time periods to be compared with more detail than has previously been possible. This paper presents a brief description of the GBHGIS database and the analytic approaches that we are taking to analyse the data that it contains.