Mapping the World of History

The semester is drawing to a close, and my weeks are now one, big, long never-ending day filled with project after project. The end is in sight, and yet there is still a long way to go.

One of these projects is for my Digital History class, which asked that we explore some new area of digital history and try it out. It was basically an exercise I learning something new, and having something to put into our portfolios for when we eventually graduate (which admittedly at this point does not feel like it is going to happen).

For this project I chose to explore the world of GIS and see how it can be applied to history. GIS stands for Geographical Information System and it was developed in the late 1980s by academic geographers. It was initially designed to represent quantitative data, and was used almost exclusively for social scientific information. This has been steadily changing in recent years as GIS technology has been applied to history. It has been developing so quickly in fact that there is now a separate category for GIS in history, creatively named Historical GIS (HGIS).

In history GIS technology has been used mainly for spatial representations and information. It has been used to visually show a historical event, such as the movements of an army on a battlefield, or the spread of a disease through a city, or even how the parameters of a location have changed over time.

For my project I decided to apply this technology, and its visual capabilities to the Fathom Five National Marine Park and see if I could tell its geological and cultural history more effectively through this location based system. I used a program called ArcGIS, developed by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri). They developed a program called storymaps, which is what I used to communicate my information.

 

I really liked this program, it was easy to use, and it easily combined GIS information with historical photos and information.

Map with GIS data over-layed. The boundaries of the park and the bathymetry of the park.

I used the ArcGIS online database to access the boundaries of the park, and the underwater topographic information, but I also added points of my own. The Fathom Five park is home to twenty-two shipwrecks, which are used to preserve and study shipping history on the Great Lakes. I discovered that the parks website had a map of these wrecks, but that the map was not interactive. Through the GIS software I was able to change that.

The history of the Fathom Five National Park is something close to my heart, as it is an important part of the development of my hometown. I have visited this park many times and every time I am blown away by its beauty and wealth of history. This is only part of the reason I chose to explore the parks history through GIS. This technology and its application to history is a rapidly growing field, and one that I think could change the way that historians approach researching and representing events from the past. In the words of Jack Dangermond, the creator of ArcGIS, “The application of GIS is limited only by the imagination of those who use it”

If you want to see the finished storymap follow this link! The Fathom Five National Marine Park storymap