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

“All the world’s a stage”: A GIS framework for recreating personal time-space from qualitative and quantitative sources

This article presents a methodological model for the study of the space‐time patterns of everyday life. The framework utilizes a wide range of qualitative and quantitative sources to create two environmental stages, social and built, which place and contextualize the daily mobilities of individuals as they traverse urban environments. Additionally, this study outlines a procedure to fully integrate narrative sources in a GIS. By placing qualitative sources, such as narratives, within a stage‐based GIS, researchers can begin to tell rich spatial stories about the lived experiences of segregation, social interaction, and environmental exposure. The article concludes with a case study utilizing the diary of a postal clerk to outline the wide applicability of this model for space‐time GIS research

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

Creating deep maps and spatial narratives through design

An interdisciplinary team of researchers were challenged to create a model of a deep map during a three-day charette at the NEH Institute on Spatial Narratives and Deep Maps. Through a reflexive process of ingesting data, probing for fruitful research questions, and considering how a deep map might be used by different audiences, we created a wireframe model of a deep map and explored how it related to spatial narratives. We explored the tension between interfaces for exploratory and structured views of data and sources, and devised a model for the intersections between spatial narratives and deep maps. The process of creating wireframes and prototype screens—and more importantly, the discussions and debates they initiated—helped us understand the complex requirements for deep maps and showed how a deep map can support a humanistic interpretation of the role of space in historical processes

Seroprevalence of Pandemic Influenza H1N1 in Ontario from January 2009–May 2010

We designed a seroprevalence study using multiple testing assays and population sources to estimate the community seroprevalence of pH1N1/09 and risk factors for infection before the outbreak was recognized and throughout the pandemic to the end of 2009/10 influenza season.Residual serum specimens from five time points (between 01/2009 and 05/2010) and samples from two time points from a prospectively recruited cohort were included. The distribution of risk factors was explored in multivariate adjusted analyses using logistic regression among the cohort. Antibody levels were measured by hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) and microneutralization (MN) assays.Residual sera from 3375 patients and 1024 prospectively recruited cohort participants were analyzed. Pre-pandemic seroprevalence ranged from 2%-12% across age groups. Overall seropositivity ranged from 10%-19% post-first wave and 32%-41% by the end of the 2009/10 influenza season. Seroprevalence and risk factors differed between MN and HAI assays, particularly in older age groups and between waves. Following the H1N1 vaccination program, higher GMT were noted among vaccinated individuals. Overall, 20-30% of the population was estimated to be infected.Combining population sources of sera across five time points with prospectively collected epidemiological information yielded a complete description of the evolution of pH1N1 infection

Introduction to part III

Scholars have long had an interest in the study of urban environments and the residents who occupy them. Contributions to the study of the urban past are made by scholars across the social sciences, including geographers, historians, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and political scientists and this is reflected in the scholarship found in this section and throughout the rest of this book. Mapping and analysis of urban social spaces arguably can be traced back to the work of Robert Park and the rest of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology in the 1920s. Park’s work includes the now well-known concept of human ecology, the idea that the urban experiences of humans are divided along the lines of communities and society.1 Park noted that in urban spaces, ‘social relations are so frequently and so inevitably correlated with spacial [sic] relations’.2w His concept inspired his colleague Ernest Burgess to develop the concentric ring model of urban development, a staple theory in urban geography, that illustrates how neighbourhoods of socially segregated peoples emerged in cities and would change through time.3

Introduction to part II

Historical GIS impacted the wider scholarly world at the start of this century with the publication of exploratory volumes in four consecutive years: 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003.1 Along with urban history, economic history was an ‘early starter’ in the adoption of GIS technologies and methodologies, with an emphasis more on the former (visualization) than the latter (measurement). This early and enthusiastic take-up stemmed from the fact that several economic historians, especially those associated with the transportation revolution, were already pushing on the mapping front prior to the arrival of GIS, wrestling with vector plotters and trying to calculate distances and proximities. The arrival of GIS was the answer they had long sought

Introduction to part VI

The previous parts have shown the use of historical GIS in a range of subjects where the use of GIS has reached maturity leading to scholarship that has delivered new understandings. This has occurred in a range of subjects: population and demographic history, economic history, urban history, rural and environmental history, and political history. These fields are all well-suited to GIS because they all make extensive use of quantitative or cartographic sources that can be effectively modelled and analysed within a GIS environment. This has led to a situation where GIS has become an established approach in fields where quantitative sources can be used, but has left the field as largely irrelevant to much of mainstream history which does not use these types of source or approach There has been much resulting critiquing of the limitations of historical GIS and currently conceived.1