September 4, 2008

Ian N. Gregory (Day 1, Part 2)

 Ian N. Gregory (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Lancaster University)
 
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.