A place in history: a guide to using GIS in historical research

CHAPTER 5: TIME IN HISTORICAL GIS

5.1 Introduction

For many years researchers in both geography and history have been arguing that to truly understand a phenomenon there must be a proper handling of both location and time (see for example Haggett 1979; Langton 1972; Massey 1999; Parkes and Thrift 1980; Thrift 1977). This effectively means that data should be handled using all three of their components: attribute, space, and time. As we have seen, GIS is good at handling attribute and space. Unfortunately most commercial GIS software packages do not include temporal functionality. This is because there are some serious conceptual issues that present barriers to handling time fully within the GIS data model. Users are thus left largely on their own in how they approach handling spatio-temporal data. This makes implementation difficult but provides the researcher with the opportunity to develop solutions that are sympathetic to their data and their research, rather than being saddled with off-the-shelf solutions provided by vendors. This chapter reviews the issues and problems associated with using time in GIS, and looks at some examples of how researchers have approached handling all three dimensions of data simultaneously.