PROFILE
Ian N. Gregory
Employment:
Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Lancaster University, 2006 on
Associate Director/Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, Queens University Belfast, 2005-06
Research Fellow, Dept. of Geography, University of Portsmouth, 2000-2005.
Research Fellow/Principal Researcher on the Great Britain Historical GIS Project, Dept. of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, 1994 to 2000.
Academic Qualifications:
Ph.D. “A historical GIS for England and Wales: A framework for reconstructing past geographies and analysing long-term change” (2001) from Queen Mary, University of London.
M.Sc. in Geographical Information Systems (1994) from Edinburgh University.
B.Sc. (Hons.) in Geography (class 2i) (1992) from Lancaster University.
■ Selected Publications
Gregory I.N. and Ell, P.S. (2007) Historical GIS: Technologies, methodologies and scholarship. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Gregory I.N. (2003) A place in history: A guide to using GIS in historical research. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Gregory I.N. (2008, in press) “Different places, different stories: Infant mortality decline in England & Wales, 1851-1911” Annals of the Association of American Geographers.
Gregory I.N. (2008, in press) “Using Geographical Information Systems to explore space and time in the humanities” in Greengrass M. and Hughes L. (eds.) Virtual Representations of the Past.
■ Message
I am very much looking forward to this meeting. I think that it will be very valuable and is extremely timely given the growth of Digital Humanities internationally. Digital Humanities clearly has much to offer the study of Japanese Arts and Culture and the rest of the world has much to learn from Japanese approaches to this topic.
Abstract
A Place in the Humanities
The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has become well established in historical research, especially in those aspects of history concerned with the analysis of statistical sources such as the census, or cartographic ones such as old maps. This work has had a numberof successes in demonstrating the importance of geography in historical analyses. More recently there have been calls for GIS to be used across the humanities. If this is to happen approaches to GIS need to be developed that allow it to be used with texts, the type of source most widely used in the humanities. This paper will review how GIS has been used in historical research to date and demonstrate how it can be applied to new disciplines such as Literary Studies.
