Historical GIS and the Spatial Turn / Geographies of the Holocaust

     It has been a few weeks, but today I will be talking about historical geographical information systems (GIS), the Spatial Turn, and some examples of historical GIS in action. Historical GIS is a very important tool in digital history. It has allowed historians to look at data in new ways to find different patterns across different scales, both geographically and temporally. 

    It would be a disservice to not talk about Anne Kelly Knowles while talking about historical GIS. In 2000, Knowles wrote and article for the Social Science History journal and talked about how in the 1998 and 1999 Social Science History Association sessions were buzzing with academics excited about historical GIS. This was a new way for people across different fields to use technology in new ways to do historical research. In this article, Knowles defines historical GIS as "... a spatial database that integrates map-based information about the historical location of certain entities... with quantitative and qualitative information about those entities...". She mentions that the key difference between HGIS and GIS is that HGIS will use sources that are mainly print that need to be converted to a digital format (452). When writing this article, there were already some projects that were using historical GIS, but Knowles was proposing that it was about to take off as we entered the 21st century. She argues that HGIS will help historical research in three major ways. The first is that it will give historians accurate spatial boundaries to keep historical data correct and centered on a location. The second is that it can help understand physical geography as a constraining and enabling factor. And lastly, HGIS can help reveal new patterns and new approaches to historical data that we not have seen before. 

    Moving on to Benjamin Ray, who was writing in 2002 in Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, which was edited by Knowles, Ray examples new ways to look at the Salem witch trials as an educator. Ray's article talks about the history of the witch trials as well important historians to the historiography of the witch trials, such as Charles Upham, who was using maps in the late 19th century to make connections in Salem about the accused and the accusers. Ray was given a grant and used the money to create what is now the Salem Witch Trials Archive. Most the sources for the witch trials were print, so Ray created a digital library that worked to digitize those sources. After his first grant, Ray was given another grant opportunity, but he needed to add a HGIS element to his project. Ray was able to use the sources he digitized and the work of past historians to create a Salem map to look at patterns not seen before. For example, work had already been done comparing west Salem to east Salem. Ray was able to use new tools such as Georeferencer to make a more accurate map to depict the spatial boundaries of what would be considered "west" and "east" Salem. After recreating these boarders, Ray found a new pattern when looking at the accused and the accusers. It was known that most the accusers were from the west side of town, and that they usually accused people on the east side. Ray, however, used data from the HGIS map and from his digital sources to find out that most the accusations came from prominent leaders of the town. It also supported some previous claims that there may have been a socio-economic element to who was accused and who was an accuser. 

    Getting closer to the present, 2008, Geoff Cunfer wrote an article on the Dust Bowl in Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship, which was also edited by Anne Kelly Knowles. Cunfer's research differs from Benjamin Ray's quite a bit. While Ray used HGIS to solidify already known borders of Salem and find new patterns, Cunfer used HGIS to expand to borders of information regarding the Dust Bowl. Cunfer's research pushes against claims brought about by Donald Worster, which was that capitalism and over plowing of fields brought about many of the dust storms that defined that era. Cunfer found problems in that Worster only used data from two counties. While they are good case studies, Cunfer does not believe that two counties can accurately represent the vast Midwest that was affected by dust storms. Cunfer increased the scale, using places from Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, etc. to create a more fuller picture of what caused this large ecological disaster. By increasing the scaling using HGIS, Cunfer came to a new conclusion that was against the reigning consensus, which is that dust storms such as those seen in the 1930s were not just caused by over plowing and capitalism, but rather there were also environmental factors that were outside human control that contributed. 

    Finishing off, I want to highlight the work done Waitman Wade Beorn and Anne Kelly Knowles in Geographies of the Holocaust. I specifically would like to highlight their work on a HGIS project regarding the Einsatzgruppen (EG). While much Holocaust research focuses on concentration camps and death camps, the EG were essentially death squads that would follow the main German army killing enemies of the state and enacting the Final Solution before the construction of the death camps. This 2014 article highlights how scale does not need to be stretched out, such as Cunfer's work, and can be dynamic. Their project talks about three main categories. The first is to mark the location of the killings which the EG's did. The second is to write what actions happened. And lastly, what did their actions mean and/or represent in the Holocaust as a whole. This could be scaled to the whole EG, or can be broken down if enough information in known about a single soldier in EG. The scale can the personal view of that soldier. These projects throughout the years, and Knowles involvement in them, have shown how history has adapted and becoming more well versed in using HGIS not as a tool to replace tradition historical research, but as a tool to display the research in a new way.