This book illustrates how literature, history and geographical analysis complement and enrich each other’s disciplinary endeavors. The Hun-Lenox Globe, constructed in 1510, contains the Latin phrase 'Hic sunt dracones' ('Here be dragons'), warning sailors of the dangers of drifting into uncharted waters. Nearly half a millennium earlier, the practice of 'earth-writing’ (geographia) emerged from the cloisters of the great library of Alexandria, as a discipline blending the twin pursuits of Strabo’s poetic impression of places, and Herodotus’ chronicles of events and cultures. Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria, and the mathematician Ptolemy employed geometry as another language with which to pursue 'earth-writing’. From this ancient, East Mediterranean fount, the streams of literary perception, historical record and geographical analysis (phenomenological and Euclidean) found confluence.
The aim of this collection is to recover such means and seek the fount of such rich waters, by exploring relations between historical geography, geographic information science (GIS) / geoscience, and textual analysis. The book discusses and illustrates current case studies, trends and discourses in European, American and Asian spheres, where historical geography is practiced in concert with human and physical applications of GIS (and the broader geosciences) and the analysis of text - broadly conceived as archival, literary, historical, cultural, climatic, scientific, digital, cinematic and media.
Author(s): Charles Travis, Francis Ludlow, Ferenc Gyuris (eds.)
Series: Historical Geography and Geosciences
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 290
Part I. Landscape, Time, Text
1. Ghost Cathedral of the Blackland Prairie: Waxahachie, Texas, Places in the Heart and the Superconducting Super Collider / Charles Travis and Javier Reyes 3
2. Digital Mapping and the Narrative Stratigraphy of Iceland / Emily Lethbridge 19
3. Dead Men Tell Tales: History and Science at Duffy’s Cut / William E. Watson, J. Francis Watson and Earl H. Schandelmeir 33
4. 'Please Mention the Green Book': The Negro Motorist Green Book as Critical GIS / Ethan Bottone 51
Part II. Cultures, Networks and Mobilities
5. Queer Cartographies: Urban Redevelopment and the Changing Sexual Geography of Postwar San Francisco / Damon Scott 67
6. Revisiting the Walking City: A Geospatial Examination of the Journey to Work / Don Lafreniere and Jason Gilliland 85
7. Corruption and Development of Atlanta Streetcar Lines in the Nineteenth Century: A Historical GIS Perspective / S. Wright Kennedy 113
8. 'A Brother Orangeman the World Over': Migration and the Geography of the Orange Order in the United States / Cory Wells and Charles Travis 133
Part III. Climate, Weather, Environment
9. Mining Weather and Climate Data from the Diary of a Forty-Niner / Jase Bernhardt 149
10. Unmappable Variables: GIS and the Complicated Historical Geography of Water in the Rio Grande Project / Daniel R. Beene and K. Maria D. Lane 163
11. Supplying the Conquest: A Geospatial Visualization
and Interpretation of Available Environmental Resources at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 / C. M. Hewitt 179
12. Mapping the Irish Rath (Ringfort): Landscape and Settlement Patterns in the Early Medieval Period / Robert Legg, Francis Ludlow and Charles Travis 197
Part IV. Place, Philology, History
13. Mapping Power: Using HGIS and Linked Open Data to Study Ancient Greek Garrison Communities / Ryan Horne 213
14. The Preservation of Paradox: Bismarck Towers as National Metaphor and Local Reality / Gordon Cromley and Chris Post 229
15. Mapping the Historical Transformation of Beijing’s Regional Naming System / Yong Yu 247
16. Geographical Enrichment of Historical Landscapes: Spatial Integration, Geo-Narrative, Spatial Narrative, and Deep Mapping / May Yuan 259
