Critical Historical GIS, Spatial History, and Linked Gazetteers

The best spatial history scholarship lies at the confluence between questions from cultural geography about space and place; GIScience questions about data modeling and data visualization; and humanistic questions about power and representation. Evoking the concept of critical GIS, my presentation takes up two questions. First, how to situate GIS within the field of spatial history; and second, how to encourage historical GIS practitioners to engage with critical geographers seeking to “trouble the map” by thinking about the discursive and ideological investments of technology. My presentation advocates for spatial historians to investigate how the social construction of space and place reflects and reinforces relations of power, dominance, and hierarchy – starting from humanistic approaches to cultural geography rather than beginning with a presumption for certain digital tools or methods. Doing so permits us to critically scrutinize, case by case, which methods best permit us to answer vital questions about dynamics of spatial change in the human past. My networks orient me toward historical gazetteers and around the prize-winning World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) project. Therefore, my presentation also evaluates Historical GIS relative to gazetteers – indexes of historical place names. I will explain how gazetteers can present multivocal and decolonial perspectives on the human past, incorporate linked information about historical places, and handle temporality in a sophisticated way. Spatial humanists and others have long recognized the enormous integrative potential of using places as common points of reference for heterogeneous information. To realize that potential, collections of named places must be abundant, diverse, collectively assembled, and historically deep. Linked Data methodologies, like those integrated into the WHG platform, make it feasible to surface suppressed place names and difficult histories by supporting peoples’ discoveries about past places.