GIS and research into historical "spaces of practice": Overcoming the epistemological barriers

Abstract

Henri Lefebvre's argument that (social) space is a (social) product inadequately theorized in terms of its surface geometry has been highly influential in inspiring the spatial turn in social theory that has made such an impact on historical studies. The development of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as a method available to historical geographers and historians stands in ambivalent relation to this project. On the one hand Historical GIS (HGIS) offers historians a powerful way to organize, query and visualize spatial data, enabling them to think spatially. On the other hand, it comprises a technically complex set of quantitative methods that is vulnerable to the accusation that it sustains the formalist fallacies of modernism and the division of space into exclusive subjective and objective epistemologies that Lefebvre did so much to overcome. This chapter does not seek either to vindicate or condemn the use of GIS in historical research so much as to raise a series of epistemological issues that arise for traditional modes of historical explanation when doing so and to argue that these require further consideration. It is argued that if these can be addressed, a significant contribution of HGIS to future historical research lies in its potential to provide an appropriate methodological platform for the identification of rich descriptions of historical spaces of practice through archive-based empirical research. Such spatial descriptions that pertain primarily to the non-representational qualities of everyday practices and touch on the embodied nature of historical experience can help to redress the prevailing emphasis on modes of spatial representation. However, the challenge remains for HGIS to avoid an uncritical emphasis on visualization and to encourage the emergence of an open-ended method for including spatial description in historical explanation while avoiding simplistic models of environmental causation in which the spatial and the social become artificially polarized.