Robert M. Schwartz

Spatial History: Railways, Uneven Development, and Population Change in France and Great Britain, 1850-1914

A comparative spatial history combining historical narrative, geographical thinking, and spatial analysis of historical data offers new perspectives on railway expansion and its effects in France and Great Britain during the long nineteenth century. Accessible rail transport in the rural regions of both countries opened new economic opportunities in agriculture, extractive industries, and service trades, helping to revitalize rural communities and decrease their rates of out-migration. In France, long-standing economic disparities between the developed north and the less-productive south gradually reduced. These conclusions are based, in part, on the use of historical geographical information systems (hgis) and spatial statistics, illustrating a component of spatial history.

Mapping the Distortions in Time and Space: The French Railway Network 1830–1930

Abstract Accessibility is frequently used in transportation planning to measure the efficiency of new infrastructure in terms of travel time and population served. In this article, the authors apply accessibility concepts based on the geo-historical angle. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationships between population dynamics and the railway expansion from 1830 to 1930. Their approach considers a local scale composed of some 36,000 French communes for the demographic data and more than 28,000 kilometers for the railway network. The methodological framework of this database is based on historical geographic information systems completed by anamorphosis analysis. In this way, they are able to map the changing contours of accessibility from the local to the regional and national scales for historical time.

Digital Partnership: Combining Text Mining and GIS in a Spatial History of Sea Fishing in the United Kingdom, 1860 to 1900

The partnering of computer assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDA) and GIS permits the analysis of voluminous historical documents and the incorporation of geographic perspectives to bring out spatial relationships that exist in the texts. The British Parliamentary investigations into sea fishing comprise a large body of evidence on the transformation of the trade, the exponential growth of the fish harvest, and the evolving recognition that over-fishing was underway. The use of CAQDA and GIS described in this article explores some 1,800 pages of testimony given by fisherman, scientific experts, and regulatory officials before the Parliamentary commissions of enquiry in 1863–1866 and 1893–1894.

National Historical Geographical Information System as a tool for historical research: Population and railways in Wales, 1841–1911

One of the early drivers of historical GIS was the development of national historical GISs. These systems usually hold all of a countrys census and related statistics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such they have represent an extremely valuable resource, but at the same time they were and remain extremely expensive and time consuming to build. Was the investment worthwhile? This paper takes one of these systems, the Great Britain Historical GIS, and explores how it was built, what methodologies were developed to exploit the data that it contains, and provides an example to demonstrate how it made possible a unique analysis of railroads in Wales before the First World War.