Is There a Place or Space for GIS in History?

History is as much about time as it is about space, place, and territory. Not accidentally, historians have long used paper maps as their data (maps made at different time periods) and as a form of analysis (e.g., historical atlases, maps of historic battles, etc). Maps have always been an incredibly succinct and visually powerful way to tell a story. On the one hand, therefore, turning to digital mapping technologies is continuous with this tradition. On the other hand, geospatial technologies created new ways of analyzing and representing by connecting digital maps to data behind the map. In this way, they open new opportunities and pose new challenges to historians. Geographers working in the new fields of critical cartography and critical GIS have addressed these opportunities and challenges in a number of ways. I will raise some of these issues here that I hope would be of interest to historians - maps as facts vs medium of power, authorship of maps, what gets to be represented and what is silenced, and what kind of information is conveyed and which is excluded.