Do Historical GIS and Digital Humanities Walk Hand in Hand?

Abstract

In a number of countries today, borrowing from a discussion that originated in Anglo-Saxon countries, there is an increasingly insistent discussion of historical GIS as one of the stars of the digital humanities galaxy. The reasoning has been addressed, albeit with some delay and distinctly by disciplinary sectors, in a number of contributions and congresses and has seen the prevalence of a substantial acceptance of this thesis that pegs historical GIS as a component of the macro-sector of digital humanities. An alternative reading on the real convenience of maintaining a rather disciplinary distance between both is offered for the purposes of cognitive growth. It is therefore not a question of establishing primaries or hegemonies of one over the other but rather a “call to arms” (historians, geographers, urban planners, archaeologists, ecologists, etc.) by leveraging the scientific heterogeneity (interdisciplinarity), offering space for common dialogue. Thus, through the uniting of different forces that individually remain partial and marginal in the use of historical GIS will it be possible to consider real growth that can enable an effective enrichment of geographical-historical-cartographic research based on the use of GIS in face of the digital humanities.