1 Martyn Jessop, King’s College London. Email: [email protected]

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Martyn Jessop, King’s College London.Email: [email protected]

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The Project

• Project Description• Budget £5000.• Pilot project – establish approaches,

techniques and novel solutions.• One of a group of spatial data projects

within the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH).

• Did not involve GIS specialists.

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Location of Kastoria

Turkey

Bulgaria

Romania

Greece

Albania

Italy

FormerYugoslavia

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Dividing Time

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Sources and ‘Products’

Legacy

Database

Paper Maps

Geographical

Information

System

GIS for use by academics at museum

Web SiteMaps

Archive

Documents

Old Photos

Existing Multimedia Presentation

Digital Resource for General Use

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Presentation of Maps on the Web

• Static image files.

• Image Library software.

• Limited Interactivity (Image Maps, Java).

• Animated sequences of maps.

• Medium Interactivity (Geotools)

• Fully Interactive GIS

• What’s used in the project?

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The aims of the GIS

• Preserve the database and open it to a wider audience via the web.

• Produce maps for the website.• Desktop GIS for academics (MapInfo)

- move from map drawing to analysis.

- visualisation tool.

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Data Flow Through the Project

On Screen Digitisation

Mapinfo

Map Drawing

Static Maps

Image Maps

Animations

(Javascript)

Location Data

(Paper Maps)

Desktop A4 Size Scanner

(produces image files)

Attribute

Data(legacy

database)

Microsoft Excel

(Pre-processing and further

data generation)

Future Simple Web-based GIS??

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Spatial and Attribute Data

120 Villages.

50 Data items per village.

6000 items.

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Additional Geographic Data

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Maps from GIS

• Summaries of data – population etc. Example

• Location of events – exchanges, violence, etc. Example

• Data access. Example

• Exploratory.

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Exploratory Maps

Animation Example

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What happened 1900-1905?

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Experiences of the Project

Views and aims changed substantially during project

• There are novel solutions to cartographic problems utilising the Web.

• Even simple maps are (very) useful.

• Levels of expertise/experience required

• Cost need not be high.

• Expect to digitize.

• Use ‘multi-application’ approach

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Experiences of the project (II)

• Must keep data well organised.

• Tyranny of the Web site – keep to project objectives.

• Keep notes about processes and progress.• It’s about people not phenomena.

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GIS in the Humanities

• Designed by scientists for scientists - philosophy is fundamentally different.

• Can GIS link human agency to change?• Problems with generalisation and uncertainty.• Is it worth it?• What’s next - web based toolkit (open souce)

- wider role for CCH?