The Role of Precision in Spatial Narratives: Using a Modified Discourse Quality Index to Measure the Quality of Deliberative Spatial Data

The importance of spatial precision in geographic information science is not limited to quantitative data. As spatial data can also exist in qualitative form, modifying a discourse quality index from the field of discourse ethics can help understand whether mentioning specific spatial locations changes the quality of spatial narratives. The discourse quality index was modified by incorporating an item into the index that detected the presence and magnitude of a spatial precision construct. The spatial narratives analyzed with this modified index were 151 public comments submitted during a public policy revision process, for a national forest plan revision at the Chugach National Forest in Alaska, USA. Analysis showed when discourse quality values underwent a comparison of means test, the values were significantly changed between comments with no spatial precision versus those considered to have spatial precision. The results suggest, preliminarily, that employing spatial precision in narratives changes discourse quality during deliberative activities. Further, the way in which people use spatial precision to communicate during a policy revision process can impact how spatial narratives are understood and valued.

Historical and Imagined GIS Borderlandscapes of the American West: Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove Tetralogy and LA Noirscapes

Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning counter-western Lonesome Dove (part of a tetralogy, set between 1840 and 1900) and the works of LA Noir detective fiction writers (from the 1940s to 1997) represent the American west and urban southwest of Los Angeles as a dynamic mosaic of human and environmental borderlandscapes. McMurtry's perspective provides an Anglo-European eye, influenced by Cervantean Iberian literary tropes on the transformation of the West from indigenous and Spanish trails to American rail-road tracks. The LA Noirscapes map phenomenologically illustrates how the location of novel settings cluster in contiguous and convergent places on a street grid palimpsest of Los Angeles between 1949 and 1997. Employing HumGIS methods, this essay considers the marriage of empirical cartography and impressionistic topography; the former concerned with latitude, longitude and space, the latter with plotting literary, historical and cultural perceptions and experiences of place. By engaging the concept of Euclidian space with the phenomenology of place, geographers can contextualize field work, and other methods with literary, cartographical and GIS analysis to uncover the means to craft new avenues to study the dynamic and symbiotic formations of historical landscapes, identities, senses of place and location.

Construction and Management of a Geo-Historical Information System for an Interdisciplinary and Contributory Atlas: The Historical Atlas of Limousin

At the University of Limoges in the center of France, we started developing an Historical Atlas of the region of Limousin (AHL) in 2014. The Atlas is one part of a project to gather spatial-temporal information and historical sources about the history of the region. It offers an editorial space and cartographic interface where the regional and scientific community can interact, share, and disseminate their historical knowledge and data. As such, this project represents a close interdisciplinary exchange between historians, archeologists, geographers, GIS and data scientists, as well as varied data producers such as public actors (universities, local authorities, archives), private societies (archeology and tourist operators) and associations. This article tells the story of this dialogue and explains the interdisciplinary, multimedia and spatial-temporal data model and public interface that resulted from it.

Bridging the Gap between Pre-census and Census-era Historical Data: Devising a Geo-sampling Model to Analyse Agricultural Production in the Long Run for Southeast Europe, 1840–1897

This research introduces a novel geo-spatial sampling model to overcome a major difficulty in historical economic geography of Bulgarian lands during a crucial period: immediately before and after the de facto independence of the territory from the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. At its core it seeks to investigate the research question how the Bulgarian independence affected agricultural production in two regions (centered around the cities of Plovdiv and Ruse) of today's Bulgaria, for which there are conflicting yet empirically unsubstantiated claims concerning the economic impact of the political independence. Using our be-spoke geo-sampling strategy we believe, we have sampled regionally representative commensurable agricultural data from the 1840s Ottoman archival documentation, in accord with agricultural censuses conducted by the nascent nation state of Bulgaria in the 1890s.

Displaying Spatial Epistemologies on Web GIS: Using Visual Materials from the Chinese Local Gazetteers as an Example

In this paper, we introduce a web GIS platform created expressly for exploring and researching a set of 63,467 historical maps and illustrations extracted from 4,000 titles of Chinese local gazetteers. We layer these images with a published, geo-referenced collection of Land Survey Maps of China (1903–1948), which includes the earliest large-scale maps of major cities and regions in China that are produced with modern cartographic techniques. By bringing together historical illustrations depicting spatial configurations of localities and the earliest modern cartographic maps, researchers of Chinese history can study the different spatial epistemologies represented in both collections. We report our workflow for creating this web GIS platform, starting from identifying and extracting visual materials from local gazetteers, tagging them with keywords and categories to facilitate content search, to georeferencing them based on their source locations. We also experimented with neural networks to train a tagger with positive results. Finally, we display them in the web GIS platform with two modes, Images in Map (IIM) and Maps in Map (MIM), and with content- and location-based filtering. These features together enable researchers easy and quick exploration and comparison of these two large sets of geospatial and visual materials of China.

A Spatial Analysis of Selected Art: a GIScience-Humanities Interface

This exposition presents little-known connections between geography, through geographic information systems (GISs), mathematics, through matrix algebra, and art, through paintings and images, adding to the geo-humanities, spatial humanities, and humanistic mathematics literature. To this end, findings summarized for spatial statistical analyses of selected Susie Rosmarin paintings (which are reminiscent of visualizations of certain mathematical quantities known as eigenvectors), remotely sensed images that have appeared in art exhibits, and selected famous paintings by historically renowned artists reveal that spatial autocorrelation constitutes a fundamental element of art. These analyses extend the tradition of visualizing fractals as art, and interfacing cartography with art. This paper promotes analytical art, and establishes additional commonalities for GIScience, mathematics, and art.

Letters from Spain in a Space-time Box: Historical GIS with Timestamped Itineraries for Understanding the Chronotopes of Nineteenth-century Travel Writing

This article documents the use of historical GIS with timestamped itineraries to better understand a large multilingual corpus of nineteenth-century travelogues about Spain and their diverse ‘chronotopes’ (meaningful intersections of space and time in a narrative, as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin), which remain unnoticeable when one reads travelogues as traditional literary texts. The authors offer a rationale for using historical maps and GIS with timestamps, discuss the challenges posed by a multilingual historical dataset with partially imprecise or inferred information, and share their approach to overcoming these challenges in data collection, the creation of gazetteer, and timecoding. Despite focusing on travelogues, these tools and approaches are transferable to the visualisation and analysis of other texts in which chronotopes matter.

How Can Geographic Information in Text Documents be Visualized to Support Information Exploration in the Humanities?

Finding and selecting interesting and relevant information in large online digital text archives can be challenging. We tackle this information access problem from a geographic information science perspective using a case study exploring a semi-structured historical encyclopedia. We propose a three-pronged approach for this, based around (1) automatic retrieval of spatio-temporal and thematic information from digital text documents; (2) transformation of the extracted information to spatialize and visualize spatio-temporal and thematic structures; and (3) integration of the spatialized displays in an interactive web interface driven by a user-centered design and evaluation approach. We implemented an interactive spatialized network display to allow identification of spatio-temporal relationships hidden in the text archive, complemented by an interactive self-organizing map display to visualize thematic relationships in these text documents. We evaluated the utility and usability of the developed interface in a user study with digital humanities scholars. Empirical results show that the developed interface supports target users in the humanities uncovering latent spatio-temporal and thematic relationships and generated new insights through the spatialized text collection. Adopting this approach, we illustrate one avenue to addressing the information access problem in the digital humanities from a GIScience perspective.

Integrative, Interdisciplinary Database Design for the Spatial Humanities: the Case of the Holocaust Ghettos Project

Databases are central to the digital, spatial, and geohumanities. There is surprisingly little scholarly literature, however, on the process of database construction in humanities projects. This article describes a process of interdisciplinary database design that emerged in the course of building the core sections of an historical GIS of Holocaust ghettos. The process foregrounds collaborative design, testing that purposely flushes out paradigmatic differences and ontological problems, and revision to incorporate group decisions and agreed-upon meanings into data structures, field definitions, and instructions for data entry. The result is a deeply integrative form of mixed methodology that incorporates ethical standards along with data entry instructions and team training.