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.
Measuring one century of railway accessibility and population change in France. A historical GIS approach
This article presents an innovative study of the relationship between railway accessibility and population change in France from 1860 to 1930. Using a large, geo-historical database and spatial analysis, it identifies key advantages of historical GIS in transport history as well as its limitations. It illustrates the challenges of creating reliable data on population change for the 36,000 communes of France over eight decades and integrating them with the main and local lines of the evolving French railways system. In so doing, it reexamines the structuring effect of railway expansion over the long period in which rail transport was the predominant means of moving goods and passengers over long distances.
An operational method for estimating signal to noise ratios from data acquired with imaging spectrometers
A method, using the concept of local means and local standard deviations of small imaging blocks and using a box counting procedure, has been developed for unsupervised estimation of the average signal to noise ratios of images in which the noise is additive. The method has been applied to simulated images with Gaussian noise, to images acquired with the Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer and with the Geophysical and Environmental Research Imaging Spectrometer. The method is compared with other techniques for estimating signal to noise ratios from imaging data. It is believed that the method is generally applicable to images having many small homogeneous blocks. Because the method does not take into account interband effects, it is not appropriate to use the method to estimate signal to noise ratios from images having nonnegligible interband radiometric calibration errors at spatial scales less than or equal to the size of the small imaging blocks used in the noise estimation.