contested commons

contested public and private spaces in England, by Prof Katrina Navickas

Digital mapping and commemoration

A talk and GIS workshop for the Winter School in digital history, University of Pavia, Italy, December 2025:

Worksheet exercises:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FNWoNSvXOhkOBnCXrcOTXqm3cOTwI8OnuddCgO0P4BE/edit?usp=drive_link

‘Gaps, maps and hacks’: a list of web platforms and software links, and further reading:

Spatial narrative visualisation:

  1. ArcGIS StoryMapper: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/
  2. Recogito Pelagios: https://recogito.pelagios.org/
  3. Flourish studio: https://flourish.studio/

Historical Gazetteers:

  1. World Historical Gazetteer: https://whgazetteer.org/

Geo-coding tools:

  1. https://www.geoapify.com/tools/geocoding-online/
  2. https://apidocs.geoapify.com/playground/geocoding/

Historic map sources and APIs for GIS overlays:

  1. UK: National Library of Scotland Maps: https://maps.nls.uk/
  2. UK: Edina Historic Digimap (requires institutional subscription): https://digimap.edina.ac.uk/historic
  3. World: David Rumsey map collection: https://www.davidrumsey.com/view
  4. Italy: David Rumsey map collection: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/view/all/where/Italy?sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort
  5. World: Old Maps Online: https://www.oldmapsonline.org/

Shapefiles of country boundaries etc:

  1. World boundary shapefiles: https://www.igismap.com/download-world-shapefile-free-country-borders-continents/
  2. Europe regional shapefile: https://www.mapsforeurope.org/datasets/euro-regional-map

GIS:

  1. QGIS: https://qgis.org/
  2. ArcGIS (requires subscription): https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-online/overview

Text markup and Linked Data standards:

  1. TEI: (for place names etc): https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ND.html
  2. Linked Places format: https://github.com/LinkedPasts/linked-places-format
  3. AAT feature names list: https://github.com/LinkedPasts/linked-places-format/blob/main/feature-types-AAT_20230609.tsv

Tutorials:

  1. Programming Historian: https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/?topic=mapping

 

Further reading:

Bavaj, R., Lawson, K., & Struck, B. (Eds.). (2021). Doing Spatial History (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429291739

Dunn, Stuart. 2019. A History of Place in the Digital Age. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group.

Gabellieri, Nicola (2025), ‘Tracing spazio and tempo: Historical Geographies in Italy 2020-2024’, Journal of Historical Geography, S8, 7-16, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2025.04.010

Gregory, Ian N. and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007

Gregory, Ian and Alistair Geddes (eds.),Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014

Gregory, Ian N., Robert Smail, Joanna E. Taylor, and James O. Butler. 2024. “Exploring Qualitative Geographies in Large Volumes of Digital Text: Placing Tourists, Travelers, and Inhabitants in the English Lake District.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 114 (9): 1985–2009. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2024.2369593

Maluly, Vinicius, Tiago Gil, and Massimiliano Grava. “Do Historical GIS and Digital Humanities Walk Hand in Hand?” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 58, no. 2 (2023): 59-63 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/904793

Navickas, Katrina and Adam Crymble, ‘From Chartist Newspaper to Digital Map of Grass-roots Meetings, 1841–44: Documenting Workflows’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 22:2 (2017), http://uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/18336/13555502.2017.pdf

Navickas, Katrina and Sam Griffiths, ‘The micro-geography of political meeting places in Manchester and Sheffield c.1780–1850’, in Micro-geographies of the Western City, c.1750–1900, eds, Alida Clemente, Dag Lindström, Jon Stobart (London: Routledge, 2020)

Rhodes, Joshua (2025), ‘Geo-coding Addresses in Historic British Census Data: an Open Methodology’, Historical Methods, 58:1, 31-53, https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2024.2431491

Taylor, J. E. and Ian Gregory, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A geographical text analysis (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2022)

Travis, Charles, Francis Ludlow and Ferenc Gyuris (eds.),Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis: Landscapes of Time and Place, (Cham: Springer, 2020)

von Lünen, Alexander and Charles Travis, eds, History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections (New York: Springer, 2013), pp. 234-6.