The Historical GIS Research Network

While Historical GIS has become a well established field, there has been increasing talk of the need to broaden this to "Humanities GIS." This reflects two things: the need to move Historical GIS beyond the statistical and cartographic approaches in which it has made the most progress to date, and the desire to spread the use of GIS into new humanities disciplines such as Literary Studies, Film Studies and so on. Implementing this requires the use of attribute data that are textual, images or other multimedia formats. It may also involve using non-cartographic representations of space such as gaming technology to create representations of the landscape.

The list below is not exhaustive. Many of the links are not as well developed as the Historical GIS Resources given elsewhere on this site. Indeed many of the links given on the Resources page are also relevant to the Humanities but we have not duplicated any. While many of the sites below are works in progress, they represent starting points for a field that can be expected to grow rapidly in the near future. If you know of any others please send us an email.

Portals:

HumanitiesGIS.org: a portal the explores the topic.

Stanford University Library has a list of humanities GIS resources although most are historical.

Guide to Online Schools has many useful links although not explicitly GIS-based.

Projects in Literature:

Mapping John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse: Interactive maps and timelines of writing about Paris.

Mapping the Lakes: A project that uses GIS to map early tours around the English Lake District.

Quakers in the North-West of England: Texts and images of George Fox's journal and other material relant to the Quakers.

Hall of Taiwan Folk Literature: A range of material, most of it in Chinese

Projects in Film and Performance Studies:

http://link.library.utoronto.ca/reed: The REED Performaces and Patrons website

Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-1867

The City in Film Project: Focuses on Liverpool

Humanities Atlases:

Map of Early Modern London: Combines a map of London with significant amounts of textual information about streets, places and literary references from the period.

Central Region Humanities Center@Ohio University: A project developing a "humanities atlas" of Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia.