I. Gregory
Significant time and effort has been invested by many countries into creating historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) that contain census and related data for the past 200 years. One of the leading examples of this is the Great Britain Historical GIS but many other countries have developed or are developing similar systems. In theory these databases have the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of long-term demographic change. A major obstacle to this is that very few techniques have been developed that allow us to explore change over space, time and attribute simultaneously without grossly simplifying at least one of these three components of the data.
This paper presents a number of approaches to this problem. A number of analytical and visualisation methods of exploring long-term spatio-temporal data are developed and explained to demonstrate how the use of historical GIS can provide new knowledge about the way a country has developed over the last two centuries.
|