In the Digital Humanities, there are many types of data that can be integrated into a GIS to manage, process, analyze and visualize. You may have been using digitized or analog maps or, you may have photographs or images of people and things that explain how a place has been built and its history or, you may have texts that narrate the history of a place and the relationships that happened there.
If you deal with these data, displaying it on a map will help you better understand the context of those events. Maybe you are interested on exploring the relationship between those events and other variables in that place or space. Perhaps you want to share your findings and data in a creative and interactive way.
In this section you can find tools to georeference (or locate in the right place on earth) historical maps and pictures and to geocode (convert addresses or places to points in a map) events or observations. If you are interested on collecting your own data on the field, check out our guide on field data collection tools.
Learn more on how to use GIS and Historical Maps here.
Digitized maps are images composed of pixels, known as raster data in GIS. In order to display this data correctly in a GIS or web mapping application, it needs to have a location attribute. Georeferencing is the process of assigning location attributes to these objects within a geographic frame of reference. The easiest way to do this process is by assigning "control points" to the map you are georeferencing and a map or data that already has location attributes.
There are two ways you can georeference your maps, using a webtool as Georeferencer or Mapwarper or, using a dektop GIS.
Geocoding is the process of translating and address into a location on a map. The process converts an address (text) into a pair of geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). In order to geocode these addresses, a big data base with street addresses, places names and references needs to be used. There are many geocoding services providers, some of them are free to use while others need licensing.
Here are some of these geocoding services and how to access them.
