GIS and History

When I was a kid, I ruined my baseball card collection by writing in additional years of statistics on their back. As an occasionally serious historian, my real love has been data driven research rather than traditional historical story-telling. You'll be hearing more of this in future blogs as we look at data about whether early Irish immigrants were achieving the "American Dream" of home ownership.

I'm also working on a project that should show whether the start of the North Easton Village District Water Department reduced the number of deaths from intestinal diseases. This research has a long history starting with a man named John Snow. Snow mapped deaths from a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and traced the disease back to a contaminated water pump.

Today we would use a computer assisted system called GIS to create such a map. GIS stands for Geographic Information System. It allows experts to create data layers that can be overlain on street maps or photos. You can actually use GIS yourself by going to the new MassGIS website. It's a little daunting and sometimes frustrating, but it can do some amazing things. I used to use it often to map information for the NRT (not that anyone ever used it).  Now I say "we would use GIS" although while I use GIS information all the time, I have to have the data entered by an expert. Luckily, Easton has such an expert in Adrienne Edwards of the DPW. Unfortunately, use of GIS and other mapping has become so important in planning that Ms Edwards is no longer available for historical projects. Tim Harrigan from the Planning Department is working hard to get up to speed with GIS and has recently updated Adrienne's data layer on historic homes in North Easton.

Building on GIS data and new historical surveys funded by Town Meeting and state funds, I've created a photoshop map that shows the pattern of development and land use in 19th century North Easton. While North Easton was not a designed community like Pullman, Illinois, its organic growth was not random. Seeing the pattern of development raised the question about the Irish workers mentioned in the first paragraph. The "real world" application of this data, of course, is providing information that can be used to convince developers to save historic properties rather than tear things down.

What sparked today's praise for GIS is an interesting article from the most recent Smithsonian. It tells the story of a geographical historian who uses GIS data to explore the battle of Gettysburg. The results are very significant and worth a read.