Finding historical GIS data can be hard to find. Listed here are available sites that offer historical country data in GIS file formats for download.
historical geography
GIS Industry
GIS and Digital Humanities
The use of GIS plays a large role in spatial-based digital humanities which has become one of the primary focus areas for many different types of humanities scholars.
GIS Learning
How GIS is Used to Understand History
Historical geography is one area that has applied GIS to understand outcomes of battles, why cities were built in given locations, and using ancient technologies to understand length and difficulty of travel at different times of the year.
GIS Industry
Abstract Machine: Applying GIS in the Humanities
In Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS, Charles B. Travis, a senior research fellow at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, uses case studies from history, poetry, and published works to explore out GIS analysis is used to explore and understand events in literature, history, and culture.
Maps and Cartography
Dragon Hunters: a Mapping Project for the British Legends
The team behind Dragon Hunters explains their crowd funding campaign currently running on Indiegogo. Can we map a legend? Can we map dragons as we map the distribution of African lions or North American bald eagles? Like eagles, dragons are told to cut the sky with their wings, but they also dig […]
GIS Data
Help Map Historical Weather From Ship Logs
The Old Weather project is a crowdsourcing data gathering endeavor to understand and map historical weather variability.
Maps and Cartography
Google Ancient Places: Exploring the Geography of Ancient Places in Text
GapVis (Google Ancient Places Visualization) allows readers the ability to geographically explore text covering ancient places. The endeavor is backed by $50,000 in funding from Google’s Digital Humanities Awards Program. The project is led by a team of academics and is based out of the University of Southampton. The Edinburgh Geoparser has been […]
Maps and Cartography
Where to Look for Historical Maps
The use of extracting data from old paper maps is growing in popularity as a method to understanding historical geography. David Ramsey popularized the method of georectifying historical maps and draping those maps over a DEM to create a 3D view. Pastmapper is a project that digitizes historical maps in […]
GIS Learning
Historical Geography and GIS
Historical GIS is the use of GIS data to document the given geography of an area in history. GIS can be used in historical geography research to map out ancient areas and the changes in cities and places over time. NHGIS (National Historical Geographic Information System) stores historical GIS data […]