I had a fantastic introduction to GIS at Friday's BootCamp at THATCamp Virginia. Are there any books you would recommend to help orient someone very enthusiastic about but new to GIS?
I just snagged Anne Knowles' Placing History : How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship out of the library here, but that's focused of course on a specific kind of application of GIS.
Any and all advice is definitely very welcome!
Kelly Johnston
MemberBest Answer
Hi Eric,
A few suggestions:
An engaging mappy introduction to GIS and its application: Maptogether
David Rumsey’s take on historical maps in GIS: Rumsey
A gentle (and excellent) introduction to GIS with examples using qGIS, one of the best free open source GIS packages: qGIS
Real world issues of cartography and presentation: Cartographic Perspectives
Librarians' lists of best GIS resources: Top 5 GIS Resources
The Bigger Picture: Maps are not the world, they are propositions: This Is Not The World
Kelly Johnston
Alex Galarza
Member
Replying to @Kelly Johnston's post:
I found this post very helpful to wet my beak with some reading. After reading from a few of your links, I was wondering if you might be able to answer a follow-up question: My adviser asked if I was familiar enough with GIS to produce maps for his manuscript, to which I replied no. Is there a standard for historians and anthropologists using GIS to produce maps for their books? Is it qGIS? Should I start with qGIS and move onto something else if I want to do my own maps for my own dissertation in the years to come? Thanks!
saschmidt8
Member
Hi Eric
I'd recommend the following books and taking a look at the bibliography and resources pages on the HGIS website
http://www.hgis.org.uk/bibliography.htm
http://www.hgis.org.uk/resources.htm
Gregory, Ian N. and Paul S. Ell. Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies, and Scholarship. Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography. 2007
Sinton, Diana Stuart and Jennifer J. Lund Understanding Place: GIS and Mapping Across the Curriculm ESRI Press, 2006.
Also though I haven't had a chance to read it yet, I think the following book may also be of interest
Bodenhamer, David J. et al The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship Indiana U. Press, 2010
Sara Schmidt
And a GIS newbie in the digital humanities might want to start here:
http://spatial.scholarslab.org/
-- an NEH-funded, community-driven "Spatial Humanities" site from the Scholar's Lab, just launched today!
It includes some great essays by Jo Guldi framing the "spatial turn" across the disciplines, and a nascent, peer-reviewed set of step-by-step tutorials -- as well as a variety of crowdsourced resources drawn from Zotero groups, hashtags, and sites like... DH Answers! :)
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