Blog Post #3: My Introduction to GIS

When getting started on this assignment I wasn’t quite sure where I should begin. I had not really encountered GIS mapping all that much in an academic sense and felt that it was going to be a daunting subject to understand.  I decided to start by looking at Josh MacFadyen’s (http://niche-canada.org/node/10564) article on the NICHE website regarding remote sensing and historical GIS and was immediately impressed with how well he was able to  explain the connection between mapping and how it can be used to help historians. I was surprised to discover that Canada was in fact considered a leader in aerial photography and had a collection of 6 million images that were mostly accessible online. After continuing with my research I began to get a better understanding of how useful aerial photos could in fact be. By looking at a collection of photos from a certain city or region historians are able to see the progression of the landscape over time. The Example that MacFadyen used was of Prince Edward Island and the rate of erosion on a specific area due to the construction of a causeway.

After exhausting my search efforts with Macfadyen I began to look for information on Anne Kelly Knowles which led me to this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X4Kesl7NnU) and this article from Smithsonian Magazine (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Looking-at-the-Battle-of-Gettysburg-Through-Robert-E-Lees-Eyes-180014191.html). Knowles seems to be one of the leaders in the field of historical GIS and her work on General Lee and Auschwitz immediately jumped out at me. While MacFadyen and Knowles are both attempting to take GIS and use it for historical study, they are doing so in two very different ways which to me shows how diverse and useful these tools could be in certain aspects of historical research.

Now that I felt a bit more comfortable with the whole GIS concept I went to search for other projects in humanities that have used GIS. I have always found it interesting to look at old satellite images to see how areas and regions had progressed over time which is why I found MacFadynes article interesting. At the end of his article he provided a link to a collection of images from the University of Waterloo and their Air Photos Digitization Project (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/locations/umd/project/index.html) so I decided to begin exploring there. The website was very easy to work as users just had to pick a particular part of the region to receive satellite images from different decades spanning quite a few years.