Visualizing Historical Narratives: Geographically-Integrated History and Dynamics GIS

Computational thinking has enabled many new scientific discoveries through the development of new algorithms, simulation models, visualization, and novel approaches to summarize the patterns and structure of complex systems. In contrast to the natural sciences, the historical social sciences (anthropology/archaeology, economics, geography, history, and sociology) pose additional challenges because data are often qualitative, vague, inconclusive, and highly uncertain. Existing computational methods reach their limits quickly with data for the historical social sciences. The authors are developing geographically-integrated history methods to overcome these limits by addressing the importance of ˝place ˛ to integrate data as the foundation of knowledge creation about how humans, events, and environments were connected to form historical narratives within and across places. Narratives are considered one of the unique and effective forms of knowledge and communication. Narratives enhance the understanding of causality by relating it to time and place and of the exceptional, such as the emergence of new forms, and they illuminate the factors producing innovation and entrepreneurship (Bruner, 1985; Hexter, 1971). Dynamics GIS (geographic information systems) and related information and visualization technologies will provide the backbone for