Abstract: Contemporary human geographers can directly experience the world they study but historical geographers must work at second hand, relying on documentary and, less frequently, on archaeological evidence; the latter is beyond the scope of this article. Exploring the past through documentary sources traditionally meant individual research in libraries and archives, but the digitization of historical sources offers several benefits. First, it widens access: original archival documents are by definition unique and the archives holding them are often remote from researchers and inaccessible to students. Computerized versions are usually accessible on the web, although digitization programs are often selective and material of interest to family historians may be accessible only on a 'pay-per-page' basis. Second, computerization has generally been a prerequisite for analytic work, notably research from the 1970s onward using parish registers and census enumerators' books. There, the organization of the computerized data closely followed that of the source material, but a third benefit of computerization is that, without damaging the source materials, data can be reorganized to reconstruct historical geographies. This in particular is the potential offered by historical applications of geographical information systems technology.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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