Applying historical GIS beyond the academy: four use cases for the Great Britain HGIS
Total funding for the Great Britain Historical GIS now totals over $US 3.5m., but obtaining this funding required us to demonstrate that the results would benefit an audience beyond academic history. This chapter describes how we have worked with four other groups to meet their needs: health researchers, archivists, government environmental agencies and companies selling advice to the property sector. The main focus is on the reasons for the collaboration, with details of the actual research provided mainly via references. The case studies presented here are of course all drawn from the experience of one project, but that experience is quite diverse, and each case study ends with some more general lessons.
Public participatory historical GIS
Abstract Building historical geographic information system (HGIS) datasets is time consuming and very expensive, especially when built at the scales that permit analysis of the lived experiences of individuals or the morphology of buildings or streets. Further, these datasets are often built exclusively in the academy, with little input from the contemporary communities they represent. In this paper, we review the use of the public in crowdsourcing historical data creation, and using the Keweenaw Time Traveler set in Michigan’s Copper Country as a case study, we call for a new approach to HGIS scholarship that includes a robust public partnership to building HGIS datasets. The creation of a public participatory HGIS approach to HGIS scholarship can increase efficiencies of, public relevance in, and extend the reach of, HGIS projects beyond the academy. We have established a set of best practices that include, incorporating the public in the HGIS interface design, providing immediate public data access, contextualization of spatial data in space-time, comprehensive public history outreach in person and online, and creating affordances for the public to contribute their own historical spatial knowledge through spatial storytelling. Together, these activities can promote the long-term sustainability and success of historical data crowdsourcing projects.
Childhood socioeconomic position and adult cardiovascular mortality: the Boyd Orr Cohort.
The relation between childhood socioeconomic position and adult cardiovascular mortality is examined in 3,750 individuals whose families took part in the Carnegie survey of family diet and health in England and Scotland between 1937 and 1939. The trend in coronary heart disease mortality across social position groups was not statistically significant at conventional levels (p = 0.12), while a strong linear trend was seen for stroke mortality (p = 0.01). Adjustment for the Townsend deprivation index of area of residence during adult life did not materially alter these findings, indicating that the effects of socioeconomic influences upon particular cardiovascular diseases differ according to the age at which they are experienced.