Abstract
This paper considers the promise that geographic information systems (GIS) hold for addressing complex historical questions. Using my experience as an environmental historian who has used GIS in a case study of the Kickapoo Valley in Wisconsin, I examine social and ecological processes of rural transformation during the twentieth century, and how these processes have shaped modern property rights debates. The multiscale range of GIS brings out the crucial issue of scale in the Kickapoo Valley's environmental history. Spatial analysis offers an important picture of landscape dynamics and land ownership in the Valley since the 1930s. Together with historical methods, GIS maps help explore the ways in which residents have constructed their own stories about property and the environment. These cultural narratives include the economic inevitability of land concentration and fragmentation, ethnic differences in land use, local places vs. the federal government, and local communities vs. newer outsiders. Results from the GIS illustrate my argument that change on the ground over many decades—rather than any inherent ideological resistance to federal policies—might better explain contemporary debates over private and public property. Finally, I use this research to outline the dilemmas faced by scholars in the humanities and social sciences who want to incorporate GIS into their own interdisciplinary studies.
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Heasley, L. Shifting Boundaries on a Wisconsin Landscape: Can GIS Help Historians Tell a Complicated Story?. Human Ecology 31, 183–213 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023928728978
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023928728978