What are the benefits of digital mapping for understanding the past?
Digital mapping allows historians to see patterns that a simple data set would not. For instance, in the assignment we attempted last week mapping the students who attended Central College, the goal was to try and see patterns in the living situations that perhaps a raw data set would not reveal. This process can be exceptionally valuable for figuring out different meanings of historical events to aid in constructing a narrative. A good example of mapping being used to solve a problem in history would be the cholera epidemic in Britain, where mapping was used from raw data to find the source of the outbreak, which happened to be a dirty well. With todays mapping tools, this process has become streamlined and myriad technologies exist that allow for historical data to be analyzed and mapped in new ways.
History is best understood when a clear story can be seen, mapping the tides of a battle for instance, or the representatives in a parliament, or the locations of battles within a larger war can lead to a better understanding of how wars are won, people are elected, and strategies developed. These insights are imperative if we want to become better historians as a culture.
Digital mapping is also an excellent teaching tool as it allows for students to visualize a given data set. This is important for helping children connect ideas in their heads to the real world. This connection is valuable to the learning process.
Some drawbacks with digital mapping include tedious data entry, but this is still far preferable to entering data by hand.
Zeke Johnson,
4/5/18