This is the syllabus of the fall 2008 version of J. B. Owens' graduate-level course Geographic Information Systems in Historical Studies (History 610). You may return to the course main page.

To learn more about the rapidly developing field of geographically-integrated history, visit the following web sites:

Geographic Information Systems in Historical Studies

This is the syllabus of the fall 2008 version of J. B. Owens' graduate-level course Geographic Information Systems in Historical Studies (History 610). HIST 610 is one of the required core courses of the History Department's new Master's degree program, which emphasizes geographically-integrated history and the use of geographic information systems (GIS).

Description: Detailed examination of major projects around the world, of handling uncertainty and fragmentary data, and of problems of interoperability in integrating data about a place and sharing data from different studies. Practice in using primary sources in conjunction with GIS and related information technologies (IT) and in creating and using geographically-integrated history databases.

There will be regular written assignments, student presentations, and a course project, which focuses on the major global phase transition of the period 1750-1850 C.E.

Questions and comments about this course should be sent to OWENJACK -- at -- ISU.EDU.

BOOKS

The following books are to be purchased:

You must bring these books to class, as well as any other material you are assigned to read. Other readings or the URLs for them will be made available to you throughout the semester as needed.

Grades will be based on the written assignments, student presentations, and the course project. Obviously, students will not want to miss class.

CLASS SESSIONS AND READING ASSIGNMENTS

(Readings are to be completed by the date indicated.)
26 August: An introduction to the course, geographically-integrated history, its context within the M.A. in Historical Resources Management, and the course project
Assignment: for Tuesday, 16 September, a memo (digital and hard copies) about your course project (as explained in a distributed sheet)
Read:
  • Gregory and Ell, chapters 1
  • Hill, the Preface and chapters 1 and 2
  • Chapter 12 of Tönu Puu's Attractors, bifurcations and chaos: Non-linear phenomena in economics (2003) [Sent to you via the class email account. If you have trouble with the mathematics, you can follow roughly the same argument in Puu, Arts, sciences, and economics: A historical safari (2006), chapter 7. Puu's chapter is really part of the reading assignment for Monday, 16 September, but if you read over chapter 12 now, you will understand better the class project when it is presented as part of this introduction to the course.]
  • Course Project assignment page and Project Evaluation Rubric page [sent to you via the class email account].

2 September: Pocatello's Historic Old Town Area: a tour conducted by Dr. Sarah E. Hinman
Assignment: "Convincing the City Council" (assignment sheet distributed at the beginning of the tour; due at the beginning of class on 16 September)
Read:
  • Gregory and Ell, chapters 2 and 3
  • Hill, chapter 3 ("Georeferenced information object types and their characteristics")
  • Knowles, chapter 1 ("GIS and History" by Anne Kelly Knowles)
  • For ideas about handling data in GIS for projects, you may wish to look at some of the sections in Ian N. Gregory (2003), A Place in History: a Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research.

9 September: Significance of GIS-based research for History and the historical social sciences
Due: "Convincing the City Council" memo (digital and hard copies)
Read:
  • Knowles, chapter 9 ("History and GIS: Implications for the Discipline" by David J. Bodenhamer)
  • Knowles, chapter 3 ("Teaching with GIS" by Robert Churchill and Amy Hillier)
  • The LaPietra Report: Report to the Profession

16 September: The emergence of new forms within a complex, dynamic, non-linear system
Due: Semester Project memo (digital and hard copies). Students will give 15-minute PowerPoint presentations about their projects. Each student will state the nature of the project, at least one spatial question to which the project will respond, the available sources of evidence, and what GIS operations the project will use.
Read:
  • Chapter 12 of Tönu Puu's Attractors, bifurcations and chaos: Non-linear phenomena in economics (2003). If you have trouble with the mathematics, you can follow roughly the same argument in Puu, Arts, sciences, and economics: A historical safari (2006), chapter 7.
  • Gregory and Ell, chapter 4
  • Visit the David Rumsey Map Collection

23 September: Workshop participation. Students will either attend the workshop of May Yuan on Temporal GIS: the past 20 years and the next 20 years at GIScience 2008 in Park City, Utah [www.giscience.org], or the TECT workshop in Madrid, Spain.
Assignment: 500-word memo on significant ideas about how to handle change and movement in GIS that you learned during the workshop
Read:

30 September: Text to GIS: digital gazetteers and metadata
Due: (1) preliminary project bibliography (digital copy); (2) memo on significant ideas about how to handle change and movement in GIS that you learned during either the GIScience 2008 workshop in Park City, Utah, or the TECT workshop in Madrid, Spain (digital and hard copies)
Assignment: preliminary gazetteer and metadata for your course project
Read:
  • Hill, chapters 5 and 6
  • Gregory and Ell, chapter 7
  • Look carefully at T. Matthew Ciolek's "Old World Trade Routes (OWTRAD): From Afrosiab to Zucchabar: A Gazetteer of Georeferenced Nodes of Long-Distance Communication Routes v. 10.1 (Jan 2007)", www.ciolek.com/OWTRAD/gazetteer-00.html, and the section "Metadata [DublinCore] describing this data set" for the data set "The Black Sea, Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of Western Europe, 1400-1530 CE, Venetian galley-operated trade routes", www.ciolek.com/OWTRAD/DATA/tmcXMEm1400.html.
  • Goodchild, M. F. (2004). "The Alexandria Digital Library Project: Review, Assessment, and Prospects". D-Lib Magazine, 10, 5.
  • Look at the ADL Gazetteer Content Standard and the Feature Type Thesaurus of the ADL Gazetteer Server

7 October: What about time?
Due: preliminary gazetteer and metadata for your course project (digital copies)
Assignment: 500-word memo on how you might use TimeMap for your course project
Read:
  • Owens 2007 (distributed)
  • Knowles, chapter 7 ("Combining Space and Time: New Potential for Temporal GIS" by Michael F. Goodchild)
  • Examine the documentation about TimeMap
  • Review Gregory and Ell, chapter 6

14 October: Forms of visualization
Due: memo on how you might use TimeMap for your course project (digital and hard copies)
Assignment: 500-word memo on the cartographic variables you would use for the visualization of aspects of the course project. Each student will give a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation about these cartographic variables.
Read:
  • Gregory and Ell, chapter 5
  • Knowles, chapter 10 ("What Could Lee See at Gettysburg?" by Anne Kelly Knowles et al)
  • GeoVISTA Studio, www.geovista.psu.edu/index.jsp
  • Lex Berman, "Modeling Spatio-Temporal Networks with CHGIS" (Presented at 2nd International Workshop on Monies, Markets, and Finance in China and East Asia, 1600-1900, Ruhr-University Bochum, Oct 2007), which you will find at the URL www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/ under docs>papers and presentations.
  • M. T. Gastner, C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman (2004), Maps and Cartograms of the 2004 Election Results [/www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election].

21 October: Spatial analysis with historical data
Due: memo on the cartographic variables you would use for the visualization of aspects of the course project (digital and hard copies). Each student will give a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation about these cartographic variables.
Assignment: 500-word memo in which you refine the spatial questions for your project and the GIS operations you would use to explore your data and respond to these questions
Read:
  • Gregory and Ell, chapter 8
  • Knowles, chapter 5 ("'A Map Is Just a Bad Graph': Why Spatial Statistics Are Important in Historical GIS" by Ian N. Gregory)

28 October: Problems of environmental economics
Due: 500-word memo in which you refine the spatial questions for your project and the GIS operations you would use to explore your data and respond to these questions (digital and hard copies)
Assignment: 500-word memo about how you would use historic maps for your course project. Find online three historic maps from the period roughly 1750-1850 that are relevant to your project, and prepare a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation about how you would use them.
Read (be prepared to discuss the environmental/ecological context of your course project):
  • Knowles, chapter 4 ("Scaling the Dust Bowl" by Geoff Cunfer)
  • Knowles, chapter 6 ("Mapping Husbandry in Concord: GIS as a Tool for Environmental History" by Brian Donahue)
  • Find something online about multi-level modeling that you feel applies to using GIS for environmental history, and be prepared to discuss your discovery in class.

4 November: Using Historic Maps
Due: memo about how you would use historic maps for your course project (digital and hard copies). Each student will give a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation about how he or she would use three online historic maps from the period 1750-1850 for the course project.
Assignment: 500-word memo on the data layers or themes you would need to have available to complete the course project
Read:
  • Knowles, chapter 8 ("New Windows on the Peutinger Map of the Roman World" by Richard J. A. Talbert and Tom Elliott)
  • Hill, chapter 4 ("Representation of Geospatial Location and Coverage")
  • A distributed reading

11 November: Historical infrastructure projects
Due: memo on the data layers or themes you would need to have available to complete the course project (digital and hard copies)
Assignment: 500-word memo about the sort of GIS-based, historical, digital infrastructure project on which you would like to work
Read and view:
  • Hill, chapter 7 ("Geographic Information Retrieval")
  • Knowles, chapter 2 ("Creating a GIS for the History of China", by Peter K. Bol)
  • Distributed reading
  • China Historical GIS, www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis
  • Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS), http://www.gbhgis.org/
  • National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS), www.nhgis.org
  • Old World Traditional Trade Routes Project, www.ciolek.com/owtrad.html

18 November: Historical infrastructure projects (religion and sacred space)
Due: memo about the sort of GIS-based, historical, digital infrastructure project on which you would like to work (digital and hard copies)
Assignment: 500-word memo about the problems you might encounter with dealing with the history of religion in a GIS context
Read and View:

25 November: NO CLASS, Thanksgiving Week

2 December: It's About Time, Again
Due: memo about the problems you might encounter with dealing with the history of religion in a GIS context (digital and hard copies)
Assignment: 500-page memo about the problems you would encounter in the current GIS environment in dealing with historical change and movement
Read:
  • Hill, chapter 8 ("Future of Georeferencing")
  • Gregory and Ell, chapter 9
  • Knowles, conclusion ("An Agenda for Historical GIS" by Anne Kelly Knowles, Amy Hillier, and Roberta Balstad)

9 December: Discussion of student projects
Due: memo about the problems you would encounter in the current GIS environment in dealing with historical change and movement (digital and hard copies)
Come to class prepared to seek help with problems associated with your semester project for the course.

16 December: Presentations of student projects
Your papers will be submitted, complete with any illustrations (digital and hard copies). You will present your project in PowerPoint format. Your presentation should be designed for a mixed audience of GIScientists and Historians.

You may return to the course main page. 

All contents copyright © 2008.
J. B. Owens
All rights reserved.


Revised: 27 August 2008


URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/gishist/syllabus.html