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.
A brokered Virtual Hub approach for the generation of web applications based on historical maps
Integration between historical maps and current cartography is nowadays recognized of primary importance in many applications (e.g. urban planning, landscape valorisation and preservation, land changes identification). However, due to large variety in Geographical Information (GI) standards and interfaces for data publishing, some technical issues arise for developers when integrating different data for the generation of new web-based applications. In addition, information overload makes difficult their discovery and management: without knowing the specific repository where the data are stored, it is difficult to find the information required. To partially cope with those problems, this paper describes a new brokering-based approach for the generation of web applications based on multi-temporal GI data gathered from different providers. In particular, this new approach is exemplified by a couple of new web applications built on top of the developed solution. Even if the two applications deal both with historical maps, they present significant differences in technical (e.g. libraries, development environment, data formats) and non-technical (e.g. user addressed, user requirements) aspects showing the flexibility of the solution.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.