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Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis

Landscapes of Time and Place

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This book illustrates how literature, history and geographical analysis complement and enrich each other’s disciplinary endeavors. The Hun-Lenox Globe, constructed in 1510, contains the Latin phrase 'Hic sunt dracones' ('Here be dragons'), warning sailors of the dangers of drifting into uncharted waters. Nearly half a millennium earlier, the practice of ‘earth-writing’ (geographia) emerged from the cloisters of the great library of Alexandria, as a discipline blending the twin pursuits of Strabo’s poetic impression of places, and Herodotus’ chronicles of events and cultures. Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria, and the mathematician Ptolemy employed geometry as another language with which to pursue ‘earth-writing’. From this ancient, East Mediterranean fount, the streams of literary perception, historical record and geographical analysis (phenomenological and Euclidean) found confluence. The aim of this collection is to recover such means and seek the fount of such rich waters, by exploring relations between historical geography, geographic information science (GIS) / geoscience, and textual analysis. The book discusses and illustrates current case studies, trends and discourses in European, American and Asian spheres, where historical geography is practiced in concert with human and physical applications of GIS (and the broader geosciences) and the analysis of text - broadly conceived as archival, literary, historical, cultural, climatic, scientific, digital, cinematic and media.

Time as a multi-scaled concept (again, broadly conceived) is the pivot around which the interdisciplinary contributions to this volume revolve. In The Landscape of Time (2002) the historian John Lewis Gaddis posits: “What if we were to think of history as a kind of mapping?” He links the ancient practice of mapmaking with the three-part conception of time (past, present, and future). Gaddis presents the practices of cartography and historical narrative as attempts to manage infinitely complex subjects by imposing abstract grids to frame the phenomena being examined— longitude and latitude to frame landscapes and, occidental and oriental temporal scales to frame timescapes. Gaddis contends that if the past is a landscape and history is the way we represent it, then it follows that pattern recognition constitutes a primary form of human perception, one that can be parsed empirically, statistically and phenomenologically. In turn, this volume reasons that literary, historical, cartographical, scientific, mathematical, and counterfactual narratives create their own spatio-temporal frames of reference. Confluences between the poetic and the positivistic; the empirical and the impressionistic; the epic and the episodic; and the chronologic and the chorologic, can be identified and studied by integrating practices in historical geography, GIScience / geoscience and textual analysis. As a result, new perceptions and insights, facilitating further avenues of scholarship into uncharted waters emerge. The various ways in which geographical, historical and textual perspectives are hermeneutically woven together in this volume illuminates the different methods with which to explore terrae incognitaes of knowledge beyond the shores of their own separate disciplinary islands.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Landscape, Time, Text

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Ghost Cathedral of the Blackland Prairie: Waxahachie, Texas, Places in the Heart and the Superconducting Super Collider
Abstract
Methods blending approaches in historical geography, GIScience and text can aid in extirpating how various perceptions of landscape (cultural and physical), identity (individual and collective) and sense of place (historical and contemporary) coalesce around a specific locale, or place. Data drawn from the IMPUS Historical GIS database and other sources were contextualized in this chapter’s exploration by the use of the following “text maps”: the film, Places in the Heart (1984), the novel Einstein’s Bridge (1997) and the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering site location report for a Federal government superconducting super collider (SSC) tunnel ring project. Drawing on the socio-cultural and historical contextualization provided by these cinematic, imaginary and engineering “text maps”, a GIS deep mapping of the local and deep history of Waxahachie, Texas, juxtaposes a cartographical filmscape of the 1930s Texas Blackland Prairie with a sideshadow model of the SSC project, abandoned by the Federal government in the 1990s.
Charles Travis, Javier Reyes
Chapter 2. Digital Mapping and the Narrative Stratigraphy of Iceland
Abstract
The relationship between narrative and place in Iceland (as elsewhere) is an intricate and symbiotic one that is always in process. Digital mapping tools make it possible to take steps towards establishing chronologies of storied places. In addition, such tools aid in the interrogation and characterisation of the reciprocal dynamics of story and place in Iceland in ways not conceivable before. The ongoing Icelandic Saga Map (ISM) project attempts to link Iceland’s rich medieval textual corpus with the country’s geography, thus facilitating a better understanding of the various functions the landscape fulfils in the medieval sagas and in other works, as well as encouraging reflection on the role that landscape has played in the transmission and reception of these works over a time-period of a millennium or so. This chapter provides an overview of the medieval Icelandic textual corpus and a description of some technical aspects of the ISM project, followed by a discussion that focuses on the methodological challenges encountered and theoretical insights gained from the mapping process. Examples drawn from the most famous of all sagas, Njáls saga, provide a sense of the complexity of correspondences between textual representations of Icelandic landscape and its ‘real-world’ counterpart(s).
Emily Lethbridge
Chapter 3. Dead Men Tell Tales: History and Science at Duffy’s Cut
Abstract
The historical problems that the Duffy’s Cut Project has sought to address concern the location of an 1832 mass grave of Irish immigrant railroaders and the cause of their deaths at Mile 59 of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad track in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Stories of the workers’ death from a cholera outbreak were originally disseminated by a few contemporary newspapers: The Village Record (West Chester), The National Gazette and Literary Messenger (Philadelphia), and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Stories also abounded in railroad and local folklore, which told of Irish ghosts dancing on their graves close to the railroad fill being built by the deceased laborers at the time of their deaths. This chapter examines archival, geological, archeological, and anthropological perspectives, employed in tandem with GIScience and global positioning satellite techniques. These combined methods were used to inform the forensic excavation of the Mile 59 site, work that identifies the cause of the deaths of the immigrant Irish laborers as homicide, and not a cholera epidemic. The story unearthed by the Duffy’s Cut Project illustrates the power of integrating historical geography, geoscience, and textual approaches to re-frame the historiographies of immigration and labor during the early years of the nineteenth-century America Industrial Revolution.
William E. Watson, J. Francis Watson, Earl H. Schandelmeir
Chapter 4. “Please Mention the Green Book:” The Negro Motorist Green Book as Critical GIS
Abstract
The Green Book, a Jim Crow era travel guide created by African-Americans for African-Americans, has received much recent popular and academic scrutiny. Consisting of almost 30 editions published between 1936 and 1966, the Green Book features thousands of addresses for businesses that catered to African-Americans during a period of institutionalized discrimination and segregation. Use of the guide allowed for safe travel by black travelers through hostile areas of the United States as it provided escape from harassment and potential violence instigated by unwelcoming shopkeepers and patrons. As a tool of resistance developed to spatially subvert white supremacy, the many editions of the Green Book provide a kind of road map that can reveal black geographies previously forgotten by hegemonic knowledge structures. However, despite this recognized social and historical importance, few studies have investigated the spatial data contained within the pages of the guidebook, or more broadly, the spaces of black geographies. This chapter seeks to fill this gap by understanding how the text of the Green Book can be read through the epistemologies of black geographies and critical geographic information science (GIS). Simultaneously, it provides insights into the geography of African-American travel patterns during an era of state-sponsored discrimination. This study embraces technological advances since the time of the Green Book’s publication to visually map spatial data published during the Jim Crow era to demonstrate how the study of black geographies may benefit from the use of critical GIS and texts such as the Green Book. Using a case study of New Orleans, Louisiana (USA), the author shows how the Green Book can be read to reveal how shifts in American racial politics, from overt segregation in the 1930s to racial liberalization in the 1960s, led to shifts in the spaces associated with African-American travel. By comparing the spatial data of the Green Book to historical census data, trends in urban neighborhood composition can explain how and why African-American travel patterns shifted within the case city. Furthermore, such mapping reveals the complex networks of spaces developed by black Americans to live within a segregationist society while actively resisting discrimination through the construction of counter-public spaces. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how historical texts, including guidebooks, can be used to provide insights into the historical geography of a largely understudied population, African-American travelers.
Ethan Bottone

Cultures, Networks and Mobilities

Frontmatter
Chapter 5. Queer Cartographies: Urban Redevelopment and the Changing Sexual Geography of Postwar San Francisco
Abstract
This chapter reflects on methodological and historiographic insights gained using GIS to reconstruct the impact of urban renewal on “hangouts for homosexuals” on the San Francisco waterfront during the 1950s and early 1960s. These stigmatized places—which entered the popular-spatial imaginary through contemporaneous local press coverage of bar raids—were initially documented as historical sites by LGBTQ community archivists who culled basic information about the physical location, approximate years of operation, and business type from oral history transcripts, newspaper clippings, early gay bar directories, and nightlife columns in the city’s first gay periodicals dating to the early 1960s. In a collaborative project with the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California, the author mapped these and similar sites in order to “sketch out” temporal and spatial changes in the sexual geography of the city. The pragmatic and technical challenges of mapping the waterfront sites, in particular, drew the author deep into the urban planning and redevelopment archives of the city in a search for basic information about the physical landscape prior to the transformation of the area from a low-rise, mixed-use, wholesaling, and maritime trade-oriented district into a freeway-oriented gateway to an expanding downtown financial district. Charting this transformation demonstrates the productive possibilities of triangulating a historical-geographic fix on the queer past from personal recollections, contemporaneous published sources, and historical urban planning documents in pursuit of a new spatial imaginary of “gay community” formation. Informed by—but ultimately not constrained by poststructural critiques of GIScience—this chapter illustrates how the representational artifices and associative power of GIS can serve as instruments for unraveling teleological narratives that conflate urban development and modern LGBTQ subjectivities.
Damon Scott
Chapter 6. Revisiting the Walking City: A Geospatial Examination of the Journey to Work
Abstract
The daily commute to work and its related social histories have long been of interest to historical geographers and urban historians. This article revisits the existing scholarship on the nineteenth-century journey to work and outlines a new methodological framework that uses a historical GIS to overcome many of the challenges identified in previous studies. These challenges include a reliance on small, atypical samples of workers, approximations of the spatial relationship between home and work, and unrealistic interpretations of journeys travelled by using only Euclidean paths. Combining city directories and decennial censuses through the use of probabilistic record linkage techniques uncovers the relationship between work and home for over 5,000 workers in London, Ontario in 1881. A GIS network-derived journey to work model re-creates more realistic journey that considers the many natural and built environment barriers that influenced the paths and distances workers travelled on a daily basis. Empirical results of the journey to work along the lines of occupational class, coincident home–work location, and gender are presented and contextualized to studies in other cities. The results highlight that the experiences of commuting differ widely along the lines of social class and gender.
Don Lafreniere, Jason Gilliland
Chapter 7. Corruption and Development of Atlanta Streetcar Lines in the Nineteenth Century: A Historical GIS Perspective
Abstract
This chapter uses historical geographic information system (HGIS) to trace the formative years of public transportation in Atlanta. Routes chosen for the early streetcar lines were examined to ascertain their effects on the mobility networks of city residents and residential patterns. This study finds evidence that Atlanta city leaders engaged in corrupt bargains to benefit themselves with little regard for the lasting effects on the city’s transportation network and spatial development. Streetcar networks in postbellum Atlanta created demographic patterns that persist today. This chapter illustrates that HGIS can enable historians to distill new value from sources underutilized in urban history. Historians have used city directories and fire insurance maps as general reference material, but HGIS can operationalize such sources into an extensive archive of historical urban processes. This type of geospatial agency provides historians with new methods of investigation that can lead to new perspectives and understanding of the urban past.
S. Wright Kennedy
Chapter 8. “A Brother Orangeman the World Over”: Migration and the Geography of the Orange Order in the United States
Abstract
Historical geographers’ explorations of migrant networks have focused have focused on ethnic and religious organization and clustering in the host country as well the influence of the sense of place in the migrant’s country of origin. This case study focuses on the Orange Order, a Protestant organization established in County Armagh in 1795, and its diasporic resettlement patterns from the Irish Province of Ulster to North America. Settlement patterns were typically anchored by Orange Lodges established as nodes on trans-national migration networks which stretch from Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, North America, Australia, New Zealand and West Africa. As much work has been conducted on Orange Order Settlement in Canada, this case study specifically examines and maps early twentieth-century settlement patterns in the United States, particularly locations in New England and the Mid-West. This case study sources data from the The International Bureau of ‘Orange’ Information, a body established in 1903 to gather information on its diasporic communities. Historical geographical information systems (GIS) methods were employed in this case study to parse, map and explore demographics of Orange Order migrants’ origins and destinations. Such methods have also been applied to explore how migrant identity is often tied to the sense of place carried from a migrant’s native country such as Scotland and Nigeria. This study contributes to the literature and mapping of the Orange Order diaspora in north-east and mid-west regions of the United States.
Cory Wells, Charles Travis

Climate, Weather, Environment

Frontmatter
Chapter 9. Mining Weather and Climate Data from the Diary of a Forty-Niner
Abstract
Primary sources such as personal diaries can provide insight into weather and climate conditions in times and places where quantitative instrumental observations are unavailable. The diary of Gideon Nichols provides an especially compelling case study of how such sources can be used to determine spatiotemporal patterns in meteorological conditions. Nichols, a farmer in Long Island, New York, elected to venture across the United States in 1849 to partake in the California Gold Rush, remaining there for 2 years before returning home via both oceanic and overland routes. Using content analysis, this chapter undertakes an investigation of his detailed records of weather conditions throughout his travels, as well as his firsthand account of major events such as the Sacramento flood of 1850. His daily recordings are supplemented by regular letters to relatives back home on Long Island, which contain ample details and emotional descriptions of his surroundings and how he experienced them. The result is a unique snapshot of the mid nineteenth century climate of numerous physical geographic regions across North America, along with a novel record of weather conditions during the early stages of the California Gold Rush. Moreover, Gideon’s meticulous attention to detail, especially geographic location, permits the spatial analysis of these patterns, using both a physical geographical approach (e.g., his comparisons of different climate regions) and chronological approach (e.g., tracking extreme weather events over the course of a year). Thus, this ongoing research complements past work by introducing a spatiotemporal component into the human interpretation of weather conditions, and can be replicated using the diaries of other pioneers who regularly observed environmental conditions.
Jase Bernhardt
Chapter 10. Unmappable Variables: GIS and the Complicated Historical Geography of Water in the Rio Grande Project
Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Rio Grande Project radically changed irrigation practices and the legal structure of water deliveries along the entire reach of the Rio Grande. The construction of Elephant Butte Dam and other modern water infrastructure in the Lower Rio Grande Basin of New Mexico set the stage for a complicated relationship between water governance, agricultural landscapes, and water users. Geospatial technologies are uniquely poised to quantify the observable effects of spatial change, but are limited in their ability to explain the human causes or repercussions of such phenomena. Using a sequential exploratory research design, pairing GIScience analysis of contemporary agrarian change and models of observed landscape transformation with historical-critical physical geography, we explore how water governance has precipitated ecological change and the loss of cultural knowledge, political change and the exacerbation of inequalities, and legal conflict leading to political battles downstream of the dam. We conclude with a discussion of the limits of geospatial models to capture the complexity and nuance of agrarian patterns and demonstrate the value of a mixed-methods approach for analyzing the formative and lasting ramifications of water governance in the Lower Rio Grande Basin.
Daniel R. Beene, K. Maria D. Lane
Chapter 11. Supplying the Conquest: A Geospatial Visualization and Interpretation of Available Environmental Resources at the Battle of Hastings in 1066
Abstract
This chapter, will present a never before considered geographic interpretation on the environmental resources available to English and Norman combatants at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. In the volume of literature on this pivotal battle in English history, such resources have only been discussed briefly, with historians questioning some of the findings. First, the battle’s historical and geographical context will be provided, followed by a discussion of the local fieldscape uses. Next, comments regarding what resources were available to the two combating armies are explored. These findings contribute to a detailed discussion of the volume and location of abundant resources including food, water, iron, salt and timber available in the area. The environmental framework of this study acts as a GIS template analysis for other similar investigations of medieval military campaigns. By considering the Middle Ages through environmental studies, we can obtain a richer and more comprehensive view of the resources and logistics available during battles than has been previously presented.
C. M. Hewitt
Chapter 12. Mapping the Irish Rath (Ringfort): Landscape and Settlement Patterns in the Early Medieval Period
Abstract
The landscape motif of the Irish rath, or ringfort, is closely associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland (400–1100 AD). Ringforts were circular or near-circular enclosures, typically constructed by digging a surrounding ditch, the material from which would be used to construct an adjacent earthen bank. The majority of ringfort sites feature a single ditch and bank (known as a univallate site), but double or triple banked sites are also known, and are described as bivallate and trivallate, respectively. Variations in ringfort morphology and in the physical geographical characteristics of their site location provides a valuable field record that is indicative of the diversity of socioeconomic roles played by these sites and of status of individuals and clans responsible for their construction and occupation. Ringfort locations generally represented the habitation centre of the farmstead, comprising one or more dwellings. Petal-shaped fields would surround the site. This chapter discusses a geographical information science (GIScience) and geostatistical study of ringfort locations in the Irish Midlands, utilizing data sourced from the Irish Government’s Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government archaeological site spatial database. This study also draws on archaeological and historical database records and fieldwork analysis in order to consider the relations between physical environmental context and ringfort settlement patterns.
Robert Legg, Francis Ludlow, Charles Travis

Place, Philology, History

Frontmatter
Chapter 13. Mapping Power: Using HGIS and Linked Open Data to Study Ancient Greek Garrison Communities
Abstract
From controlling cities within the Athenian Empire in the fifth-century BCE to maintaining isolated outposts on the border of the Parthian Empire in the second-century CE, the institution of the phrourarchia was a critical component of Greek civic and military identity. Despite its longevity and importance to the Greek world, the office has long been overlooked in scholarship, which has largely viewed the office as an isolated regional phenomenon without distinguishing between its local and imperial manifestations. There has also has been no definitive catalog of the institution or its commanders, or any attempt to show the full spatial extent of the institution in the Greek world. Until recent developments in digital gazetteers and Linked Open Data (LOD), identifying and mapping all of the phrourarchia in the Greek world was a nearly insurmountable task. However, the advent of the Pleiades project and the Linked Ancient World Data initiative has made such a project feasible. This article illustrates how new advances in HGIS and semantic web technologies has created a robust and expanding academic community and the development of best practices around the concept of sharing geospatial humanities data. After discussing the development of the ancient world LOD ecosystem, this article addresses how these resources were used to identify, locate, and study all of the garrison communities and commanders comprised the institution of the phrourarchia until the second-century CE. I discuss the creation of the first map to show all the phrourarchia, and how that task reveals that, although the institution was spread across the Greek world, the specific office of the phrourarchos, (plural phrourarchoi), or garrison commander, was primarily located in Egypt and south east Asia Minor. Mostly known through inscriptions, the presence of phrourarchoi signaled a complex interaction between imperial powers and local communities that later Greek and Roman historians often minimized or ignored. Phrourarchoi deployed by imperial powers were mostly found in subjugated communities and at the periphery of empire, and were almost unknown in imperial capitals. In contrast, phrourarchoi employed by smaller communities could be located anywhere from watchtowers at the edge of a city’s territory to fortresses within the very heart of the community. I argue that the varying locations of garrisons and commanders, in addition to the different regulations that governed the office, reveals that imperial phrourarchoi were highly specialized individuals who supported the imperial administration of their employers through a blend of intentionally vague civic and military responsibilities. In contrast, smaller communities used phrourarchoi who were largely amateurs, and had clear limits on their purely military authority. Following my analysis of the phrourarchia and how GIS methodologies aided my investigation, I close the article with a discussion of some of the shortfalls of current GIS approaches (A preliminary digital project based on this investigation is available here: http://​awmc.​unc.​edu/​awmc/​applications/​snagg/​) .
Ryan Horne
Chapter 14. The Preservation of Paradox: Bismarck Towers as National Metaphor and Local Reality
Abstract
Solving geographic questions is a complex task. To address key geographic issues, the discipline has developed a wide variety of research techniques. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have, as a tool and sub-discipline, become ubiquitous for scholars looking to address issues tied to patterns on the surface of the earth. A key trend within GIS has been to incorporate alternative frameworks for software and research design. Narrative tools have been used in a variety of ways with respect to such systems while alternative types of data beyond traditional GIS archetypes have been explored. In the past several years, humanities-based scholarship has made key contributions to reframing what GIS can be. This chapter follows a humanities GIS framework while incorporating standard GIS tools to allow us to rethink geographical and historical processes. Commemorative research represents the complexity inherent in a geographic approach. While memorials are the realization of a myriad of local drivers over time, memorials also have contexts grounded in larger geographic realities. The network of memorials to Otto von Bismarck, first minister-president of the Kingdom of Prussia and later the first chancellor of the German Empire, represents the tension between place and wider geographic discourses. Approximately 240 Bismarck Tower memorials were built between 1867 and 1935. While each tower is grounded within a specific local narrative, they were meant to provide a link to a larger discourse on national identity within the community. This chapter uses kernel density estimation (KDE) as a geo-visualization and Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) technique to uncover national patterns of the tower network that can guide our thinking of specific memorials and how we might better understand their development.
Gordon Cromley, Chris Post
Chapter 15. Mapping the Historical Transformation of Beijing’s Regional Naming System
Abstract
With the introduction of humanist and Marxist philosophies, we have witnessed a trend moving from empirical examination to theoretical discussions in historical geography. In comparison with the great developments of these theoretical perspectives, the research methods regarding how to collect and analyze data to support theories have still remained grounded in traditional notions. With the rise of historical GIS, research methods have rapidly developed from the textural to the visual, from case studies to spatial analysis on maps, and from methods separated into quantitative and qualitative to integrated methods. Although historical GIS is being used to provide new insights into geographical change over time, the changing of place names has received relatively little attention. To study changing regional names throughout Beijing’s history, I provide a new systematic classification of place names. Place names can be classified into three intertwined parts: objects and numbers (scientific/practical ways of naming), histories and emotions (humanistic ways of naming), and politics and ideologies (social constructionist ways of naming). Through spatial analysis of these groups of names, we can see that the ways of naming the regions in Beijing has been transformed from the humanistic and practical ways during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), to the social constructionist ways during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), and then to the scientific ways during the Republic of China (1912–1949).
Yong Yu
Chapter 16. Geographical Enrichment of Historical Landscapes: Spatial Integration, Geo-Narrative, Spatial Narrative, and Deep Mapping
Abstract
This chapter reviews cartographic and phenomenological views of landscape; argues for opportunities to traverse freely between the two seemly disjoint perspectives to landscape understanding, and discusses four geospatial approaches to enrich historical landscapes geographically. Innovations and advances in Geographical Information Science and Technology (GIST) not only facilitate the spatial integration of geographic features and perspectives in landscape interpretation but expand the traditional authoritative and demarcated mapping of the land into collective constructs of contingent personal experiences over space and time. The discussion applies Montello’s figurative, vista, environmental and geographic spaces to frame the transition of landscape concepts from phenomenological to cartographic perspectives. GIST methods of spatial integration, geo-narrative, spatial narrative, and deep mapping incorporate geographic features, feelings, events, and senses to enrich the representation, analysis, and communication of historical landscape. Recent developments in unmanned aviation vehicle (UAV) surveys, virtual reality, and augmented reality give great promises for further geographic enrichments to historical landscapes with holistic syntheses of cartographic and phenomenological perspectives. The chapter concludes with challenges to formalize the methodology and epistemology for studying historical landscape processes and transformation.
May Yuan
Metadata
Title
Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis
Editors
Dr. Charles Travis
Dr. Francis Ludlow
Dr. Ferenc Gyuris
Copyright Year
2020
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-37569-0
Print ISBN
978-3-030-37568-3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37569-0

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