Happy GIS Day! November 17th is International Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Day. Ralph Nader inspired the first official GIS Day in 1999, as a way for people to learn more about geography and related technology. Fast forward to GIS Day 2021: it has expanded into an international forum that showcases what GIS is all about and various applications that enhance our lives.
GIS is beginning to gain popularity among historians too, where mapping serves as a valuable record of historic resources and evaluation of data may lead to new understanding or interpretations. As more big data becomes available for public use, historians are identifying additional ways of using GIS to analyze historic trends or potential significant themes. For example, historians can now visualize settlement and growth patterns of communities over time thanks to widely available county parcel data that includes build dates.
Over the past few years, Mead & Hunt’s Cultural Resources department has been developing and refining an approach to using GIS mapping as a historic screening tool to identify potentially significant resources prior to survey. This is particularly useful for statewide highway and bridge studies, where individual research on thousands of resources would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. Using the screening tool, historians have been able to streamline identification of significant resources, saving clients on time and budget.
With accurate data becoming ever-increasingly available for general public use, GIS will continue to be a critical tool for analyzing geospatial data, offering even more methods for working to answer complex location-based questions. For historians, today is the dawning of an era where GIS and its associated data will help piece together the puzzle of our shared heritage.
