Paul S. Ell

Error‐sensitive historical GIS: Identifying areal interpolation errors in time‐series data

Historical GIS has the potential to re‐invigorate our use of statistics from historical censuses and related sources. In particular, areal interpolation can be used to create long‐run time‐series of spatially detailed data that will enable us to enhance significantly our understanding of geographical change over periods of a century or more. The difficulty with areal interpolation, however, is that the data that it generates are estimates which will inevitably contain some error. This paper describes a technique that allows the automated identification of possible errors at the level of the individual data values.

Analyzing Spatiotemporal Change by Use of National Historical Geographical Information Systems: Population Change during and after the Great Irish Famine

Several countries have made large investments in building historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) databases containing census and other quantitative statistics over long periods of time. Making good use of these databases requires approaches that explore spatial and temporal change. The authors use a variety of visualization and spatial analysis techniques to explore population change in Ireland during and after the Great Famine of the late 1840s. Importantly, the techniques allow differences over space and time to be explored, thus stressing the diversity between places, rather than making all places appear the same, a common criticism of many statistical approaches. The authors demonstrate the potential of these techniques to explore geographical and temporal variations in large quantitative GIS datasets.

Assessing and measuring impact of a digital collection in the humanities: an analysis of the SPHERE (Stormont Parliamentary Hansards: Embedded in Research and Education) project

Although a substantial corpus of digital materials is now available to scholarship across the disciplines, objective evidence of their use, impact, and value, based on a robust assessment, is sparse. Traditional methods of assessment of impact in the humanities, notably citation in scholarly publications, are not an effective way of assessing impact of digital content. These issues are problematic in the field of Digital Humanities where there is a need to effectively assess impact to justify its continued funding and existence. A number of qualitative and quantitative methods exist that can be used to monitor the use of digital resources in various contexts although they have yet to be applied widely. These have been made available to the creators, managers, and funders of digital content in an accessible form through the TIDSR (Toolkit for the Impact of Digital Scholarly Resources) developed by the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2011, the authors of this article developed the SPHERE project (Stormont Parliamentary Hansards: Embedded in Research and Education) specifically to use TIDSR to evaluate the use and impact of The Stormont Papers , a digital collection of the Hansards of the Stormont Northern Irish Parliament from 1921 to 1972. This article presents the methodology, findings, and analysis of the project. The authors argue that TIDSR is a useful and, critically, transferrable method to understand and increase the impact of digital resources. The findings of the project are modified into a series of wider recommendations on protecting the investment in digital resources by increasing their use, value, and impact. It is reasonable to suggest that effectively showing the impact of Digital Humanities is critical to its survival.

The British lsles Network of Expert Centres: A collaborative approach to the digital arts and humanities

The UKs Network of Expert Centres: A collaborative approach to the digital arts and humanities. A Network of Expert Centres has been recently been established with a broad mission to facilitate exchange of expertise and outreach across the community of practice engaged in all aspects of digital arts and humanities research and scholarship, including practice-led research; and to promote and facilitate engagement with digital methodologies within the broader research community. Areas of interest and expertise of members include data creation, curation, preservation, management (including rights and legal issues), access and dissemination, and methodologies of data use and re-use. Its membership is open to all such Centres in Great Britain and Ireland. Since the demise of the Arts and Humanities Data Service and the AHRC ICT Methods Network, there has been no centralized supporting infrastructure and co-oordination of activity in this area. While the Network is by no means a substitute for these services, ...

Historical GIS: Time in historical GIS databases

6.1 INTRODUCTION GIS has the ability to handle thematic (or attribute) information and spatial information to answer questions about what and where . Most information also has a temporal component that tells us when an event occurred, or when a dataset was produced. This component of information is not explicitly incorporated into GIS software, and has attracted only limited interest among GI scientists. A lack of temporal functionality in GIS software is commonly criticised. Progress in adding it has been limited, as GIS software vendors do not see this as particularly important for their market. As a result, researchers wanting to handle temporal data are largely left to make their own decisions about how they are going to do this within GIS. Chapter 1 introduced Langran and Chrismans (1988) idea that, faced with the complexity of data with thematic, spatial and temporal components, the traditional approach has been to fix one component, control the second and only measure the third accurately (see also Langran, 1992). They give the example of census data, where time is fixed by taking the census on a single night, and space is controlled by subdividing the country into pre-defined administrative units. The theme is the number of people counted in each unit, which is well handled at the expense of the other two components. Soils mapping gives a slightly different example.

Historical GIS: GIS and its role in historical research: an introduction

1.1 INTRODUCTION Until the mid-1990s, most historians or historical geographers would not have heard of a Geographical Information System (GIS), despite its widespread use in other disciplines. Since then there has been a rapid increase in awareness of the potential of GIS in historical research, such that a new field, historical GIS, has emerged. This book will demonstrate that historical GIS has the potential to reinvigorate almost all aspects of historical geography, and indeed bring many historians who would not previously have regarded themselves as geographers into the fold. This is because GIS allows geographical data to be used in ways that are far more powerful than any other approach permits. It provides a toolkit that enables the historian to structure, integrate, manipulate, analyse and display data in ways that are either completely new, or are made significantly easier. Using these tools and techniques allows historians to re-examine radically the way that space is used in the discipline. As with any new approach, enthusiasm for GIS is not without risks. GIS originated in disciplines that use quantitative and scientific approaches in a data-rich environment. Historical geography is rarely data-rich; in fact, data are frequently incomplete and error-prone. As a discipline, historical geography employs both quantitative and qualitative approaches and is rightly suspicious of overly scientific or positivist methodologies. Further, many researchers are introduced to GIS as a software tool rather than an approach to scholarship.