THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE POSTINDUSTRIAL: SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURES FOR STUDYING THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

Postindustrial urban landscapes are large-scale, complex manifestations of the past in the present in the form of industrial ruins and archaeological sites, decaying infrastructure, and adaptive reuse; ongoing processes of postindustrial redevelopment often conspire to conceal the toxic consequences of long-term industrial activity. Understanding these phenomena is an essential step in building a sustainable future; despite this, the study of the postindustrial is still new, and requires interdisciplinary connections that remain either unexplored or underexplored. Archaeologists have begun to turn their attention to the modern industrial era and beyond. This focus carries the potential to deliver new understandings of the industrial and postindustrial city, yet archaeological attention to the postindustrial remains in its infancy. Developments in the ongoing digital revolution in archaeology and within the social sciences and humanities have the potential to contribute to the archaeological study of the postindustrial city. The development of historical GIS and historical spatial data infrastructures (HSDIs) using historical big data have enabled scholars to study the past over large spatial and temporal scales and support qualitative research, while retaining a high level of detail. This dissertation demonstrates how spatial technologies using big data approaches, especially the HSDI, enhance the archaeological study of postindustrial urban landscapes and ultimately contribute to meeting the “grand challenge” of integrating digital approaches into archaeology by coupling reflexive recording of archaeological knowledge production with globally accessible spatial digital data infrastructures. HSDIs show great potential for providing archaeologists working in postindustrial places with a means to curate and manipulate historical data on an industrial or urban scale, and to iteratively contextualize this longitudinal dataset with material culture and other forms of archaeological knowledge. I argue for the use of HSDIs as the basis for transdisciplinary research in postindustrial contexts, as a platform for linking research in the academy to urban decision

Understanding cumulative hazards in a rustbelt city: Integrating GIS, archaeology, and spatial history

We combine the Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) concept developed within spatial history with elements of archaeological predictive modeling to demonstrate a novel GIS-based landscape model for identifying the persistence of historically-generated industrial hazards in postindustrial cities. This historical big data approach draws on over a century of both historical and modern spatial big data to project the presence of specific persistent historical hazards across a city. This research improves on previous attempts to understand the origins and persistence of historical pollution hazards, and our final model augments traditional archaeological approaches to site prospection and analysis. This study also demonstrates how models based on the historical record, such as the HSDI, complement existing approaches to identifying postindustrial sites that require remediation. Our approach links the work of archaeologists more closely to other researchers and to municipal decision makers, permitting closer cooperation between those involved in archaeology, heritage, urban redevelopment, and environmental sustainability activities in postindustrial cities

Mapping Historical Archaeology and Industrial Heritage: The Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure

While a vibrant and growing research literature exists on the value of GIS to archaeology in general, the application of geospatial digital data to the subfield of historical archaeology is less well developed, especially in North America. This is particularly true for the era of industrialization, where the archaeological record is accompanied by a comparatively rich historical record. Historical and industrial archaeology are fundamentally bound up in the interplay between material and historical data, and it is in enhancing the dialogue between these two evidentiary bodies that interdisciplinary geospatial approaches are most fruitful to these subdisciplines. Drawing on recent discussions in digital archaeology and Historical GIS (HGIS), which has a robust history in the social sciences and humanities, we present an approach to modelling, visualizing, and analyzing longitudinal physical and social environment data for historical and industrial archaeology: a Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI). Our HSDI, which is data-rich and highly flexible in scale, is especially well-adapted to facilitating this dialogue within archaeological research, as well as having important applications to heritage management and public engagement, as demonstrated in our case study

Historical Spatial-Data Infrastructures for Archaeology: Towards a Spatiotemporal Big-Data Approach to Studying the Postindustrial City

While the use of geographic information systems (GIS) has become commonplace within the discipline of archaeology, the potential of a big-data approach to GIS is yet to be fully exploited within historical archaeology. Archaeologists inspired by developments in the social sciences and humanities have recently called for new ways of conceptualizing GIS as a process that is more theoretically satisfying and methodologically effective in its applications to archaeology. We respond to these calls by proposing a new approach for GIS in historical archaeology, an historical spatial-data infrastructure (HSDI). We outline the progression from historical GIS to the construction of an HSDI and present a series of case studies that demonstrate how using a spatiotemporal big-data-based approach expands the scale of archaeological inquiry to studying the postindustrial city

Built and social indices for hazards in Children\u27s environments

Leveraging the capabilities of the Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) and composite indices we explore the importance of children\u27s built and social environments on health. We apply contemporary GIS methods to a set of 2000 historical school records contextualized within an existing HSDI to establish seven variables measuring the relative quality of each child\u27s built and social environments. We then combined these variables to create a composite index that assesses acute (short-term) health risks generated by their environments. Our results show that higher acute index values significantly correlated with higher presence of disease in the home. Further, higher income significantly correlated with lower acute index values, indicating that the relative quality of children\u27s environments in our study area were constrained by familial wealth. This work demonstrates the importance of analyzing multiple activity spaces when assessing built and social environments, as well as the importance of spatial microdata

Out of the Classroom and Into History: Mobile Historical GIS and Community-Engaged Teaching

The authors discuss the use of historical geographic information systems (HGIS) in the teaching of local history. They mention the use of HGIS in the teaching of local history, the opportunity to engage with the community while participating in an active learning environment, and present three case studies of projects using HGIS for the benefit to the community