Visualising Urban Geographies: Developing New Tools for Integrating Historical Data and Mapping

Context
Throughout the humanities and social sciences significant volumes of data are held as an address - we often describe things by postcodes - health care, poverty, crime, insurance rates, and so on. However, at all levels, from undergraduate projects to advanced academic staff research to the interests of the general public, the spatial dimension of historical information is often under-developed because the learning curve of Geographical Information Systems for non-specialists is steep.

An accessible tool will
(i) transform learning and teaching possibilities and the research potential of those who wish to map their data as a basis for class projects or research publications but who are currently deterred by need to learn GIS
(ii) enrich the historical engagement and spatial awareness of the general public
(iii) demonstrate the public benefits of university research in the humanities

Recent developments in open-source web-mapping technologies allow many new tools, applications, and research directions to be undertaken. For example, the work of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (http://www.osgeo.org) the widespread use of the Google Maps API and Google Earth, and Web 2.0 projects involving collaborative geospatial applications have allowed new ways of integrating spatial information in the humanities. However, very few of these projects use historical maps, and fewer still have been able to use archive-based socio-economic and cultural data. There is a huge, untapped potential here. It will be realised through the proposed project by developing tools for geo-referencing and integrating historical information, and by allowing online interrogation.

Visualising Urban Geographies will release this potential by re-using existing historical research on nineteenth century Edinburgh to develop a web based application that will enable users at all levels to input and manipulate map data without the need for specialist applications or scripting skills. The application will use popular, public domain web services such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth. In partnership with the National Map Library's unique collection of historical maps, it will build on their existing expertise in making these accessible online, and create new tools by integrating the maps with socio-economic data.

An easy-to-use 'one stop shop' would be hugely beneficial to spatial analysis of historical information. The project team initially identified this user need in the Humanities and Social Sciences but have subsequently, through discussion with academics both at Edinburgh University and in other HE and cultural institutions, identified a powerful demand across disciplines for a teaching and learning tool that will map geospatial data.

An example may be useful. The list of cholera patients' addresses in 1848 is difficult to interpret as it is entered in Hospital ledgers. Like entries in the Yellow Pages, making sense of the distribution of cases according to a list of addresses is not straightforward even to those who know the city well. Running these tables of addresses through post-coding software, though imperfect, renders the data in a form that with scripting, can be imported to a scanned and geo-referenced map. Repeating the exercise for the next outbreak in 1867 would reveal the extent to which the same or different areas were affected, and contribute to an assessment of how far policy measures eg slum clearance influenced the incidence of the disease. Since a considerable volume of data is address driven, many other characteristics could be mapped to provide an initial assessment of information that is difficult otherwise to evaluate. An important benefit of this process is that the spatial dimensions revealed prompts the development of research questions and hypotheses. The descriptive thus leads to the analytical, and to enhanced research quality.