HIST7008 Chap.10 Spatial History and Digital Humanities
Spatial History and Digital Humanities
What the session asks of a historian
The course poses a practical question: what happens when geographical information systems run alongside archival research instead of being added at the end? Two returns are promised, new findings and a route to readers outside the academy, and the readings show both.
The guide by Lawson, Bavaj and Struck places the field: historical GIS took shape as a distinct area in the late 1990s, and for many writers the label spatial history now serves as a friendlier name for work driven by these tools.
The guide stresses that a GIS is software working on geographic databases, used to analyse, explore and visualise their contents, so the database comes first and the map second.
The 1941 battle rebuilt moment by moment
Kwong writes about a project that set out to narrate the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong through an interactive map and a database of British defence works.
The team read British and Japanese war diaries side by side, georeferenced historical maps including the 1939 Ordnance Map, and plotted units through the eighteen days as a sequence of snapshots.
This lets Kwong revisit old judgements: that the garrison commander misread the threat at the border, that Japanese espionage had charted every defence, that the British had done little to prepare, and that Canadian troops shared the blame for defeat. Each looks different once positions and times sit on the ground.
The project also serves commemoration and conservation, giving the public a way into surviving sites.
Brothels, race and the limits of segregation
Howell, writing as a historical geographer, uses licensing records and the evidence heard by an 1879 enquiry to map regulated prostitution in Victoria.
Ordinances of 1857 and 1867 licensed brothels and required women serving European clients to undergo medical inspection, while houses serving Chinese men were exempted. Mapping reveals a shift Howell says had never been remarked: the first law confined all brothels to western districts, the second allowed licensed houses in Central and separated clienteles instead.
Central became a mixed, cosmopolitan district, and some houses for foreigners persisted in Tai Ping Shan.
Howell concludes that racial separation was more ideal than reality, and that Foucault's discipline fits less well than an imperial governmentality working through Chinese elites such as the Tung Wah Hospital.
From illustration to argument
The thread tying the readings together is a standard for when a map counts as evidence.
Richard White, cited by both Kwong and the guide, held that GIS can go beyond static illustration and become a way of doing research. Anne Kelly Knowles set out four marks of the field: geographical questions drive the inquiry, spatial information supplies much of the evidence, that evidence sits in databases recording place and time, and arguments are presented in maps.
Cunfer's study of the Great Plains, the guide's key work, shows the payoff: overlaid county maps weakened the claim that cropland caused the Dust Bowl, while drought fitted better.
Critics urge moving past crude pattern spotting to spatial statistics, or to deep mapping that keeps rival meanings of a place in view.
Carrying the method into your own work
For the Research Proposal, a mapping component is strongest when it names the claim it could overturn and the sources that would place each point.
For the Sources Essay, a historical map is itself a primary source with an author and a purpose, as the Japanese staff maps in Kwong show. Keep the costs in view too: Kwong notes that such projects need grants, specialist partners and heavy labour compiling datasets.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Historical GIS as a research method, not a picture
- 02
Knowles's four marks of historical GIS
- 03
Building the 1941 battle map from war diaries
- 04
The structures database and the British defence plan
- 05
Old claims about the battle revisited spatially
- 06
Howell on licensed brothels and colonial Victoria
- 07
From confinement to separated clienteles after 1867
- 08
Cunfer, overlay maps and the Dust Bowl
- 09
Designing a map that could refute its own claim
Worked example · free
From bringing a battle to life to finding something new
- 2Replace the vivid verb with a research function: the map forced sources into one frame of place and time.
- 2Name one finding the spatial frame produced, with its source basis in Kwong.
- 2Place the claim in the guide's account of GIS as heuristic, and rank public engagement as a second benefit.
Key terms
- Historical GIS
- A research approach that builds databases recording place and time from historical sources and analyses them in geographical information systems, so that spatial questions drive part of the inquiry.
- Georeferencing
- The process of fixing a scanned historical map to real-world coordinates so that it can be overlaid on other layers, as the 1941 battle project did with the 1939 Ordnance Map.
- Point of Interest
- A single located marker in a GIS layer; the 1941 battle project used one per unit, set near the centre of its front and sourced mainly from war diaries.
- Digital Gazetteer
- A structured list of places that records at least a name, a type and a location, and can hold several names, types and shifting positions for one historical place.
- Choropleth Map
- A map that shades each spatial unit, such as a county, by the value of one variable; Cunfer used series of them to weigh causes of the Dust Bowl.
- Imperial Governmentality
- A form of colonial power that manages populations tactically through negotiation and ascribed cultural difference, proposed by Howell in place of the idea of colonial discipline.
Spatial History and Digital Humanities FAQ
What is the difference between spatial history and historical GIS?
The two overlap without being the same thing. In the guide by Lawson, Bavaj and Struck, spatial history is a broad conversation linking urban, environmental, global and cartographic history through attention to space and place, and much of it involves no software at all. Historical GIS is one strand, in which geographical questions, databases of location and time, and mapped arguments carry the weight.
Some authors treat the two terms as interchangeable, so check which sense a writer intends before you build on their definition.
Can a historical map be used as a primary source?
Yes, provided you treat it as a made object with a purpose. Brian Harley argued for reading maps for their hidden agendas as tools of socio-spatial power, and the guide traces critical cartography back to his work.
Kwong shows a practical version: his team added Japanese staff maps from 1939 and October 1941 to show how much the invaders knew about British defences, and the errors in those maps became evidence in their own right.
Why were Chinese and foreign brothels regulated differently in colonial Hong Kong?
Officials held that Chinese women found internal medical inspection by foreigners abhorrent, so the Contagious Diseases Ordinances enforced inspection only in houses serving Western clients, and brothels for Chinese clients were spared from the start. Howell reads this as a limit on colonial power rather than simple tolerance.
The aim was to protect European clients and the armed forces, as Alfred Lister, once Acting Registrar-General, conceded when he said that saving Chinese men from disease had never been the object.
Assessment move
Take one argument from a reading you plan to use and sketch two maps: the one that would support it and the one that would sink it. List the sources that would place each point, as Kwong's team did with war diaries, and mark every location you cannot fix. If the two sketches look alike, the map cannot carry your argument; rewrite the claim until they differ, then decide which map your sources draw.
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