GIS and Historical Reterritorializations

This paper will offer a selection box of theoretical, technological and geo-historiographical insights gained from parsing and visualizing historical geodatabases in geographical information systems (GIS) with computer-assisted qualitative and mixed methods data, text and multimedia analysis. Such methods were employed mapping the Books of Survey and Distribution (ca. 1680) related to Oliver Cromwell’s Act of Settlement in Ireland (1652) and in the book Environment as a Weapon: Geographies, Histories, Literature (Springer, 2024) to explore the geographical, climatic and temporal dimensions of the Wreck of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the Napoleonic Birth of Total War in 1812, and the Carboniferous Industrial-Organic Assemblages of the U.S. Civil War. In other projects, the GIS visualization of U.S. County Names Etymology in 1890, contextualizes the rhetorical cartography of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 address to the American Historical Association, illustrating that geographical references in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, correlate strongly with locations of settlement expansion and the settings of Frontier Literature between 1600 and 1900, east of the Mississippi River Valley. Lastly, as part of the European Research Council 4-Oceans Project, the GIS mapping of nineteenth century logbook catch, and weather records kept by whaling vessels plying the Arctic, Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, engages Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) as a heuristic, to consider approaches in the emerging field of Maritime History GIS.