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| THE APPLICATION OF GIS TO THE STUDY ON HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY——Commentary on the Research Progress abroad |
| LI Fan1,2, ZHU Hong2 |
1. Tourism Department, Foshan University, Foshan 528000, China;
2. School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China |
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Abstract By comprehensive analysis on overseas theses and literatures, the article summarizes the research progress of the application of GIS to historical and cultural geography, archaeology and cultural resources management. The article firstly searches key words "GIS" in some representative international academic periodicals, such as Historical Methods, History and Computing, Social Science History, and such like. The result shows that GIS has been becoming an important research way and instrument in historical and cultural geography. Known as historical GIS, the past few years have seen a rapid rise in interest in the potential use of GIS. Its evolution can be reflected in many ways, including the publication of books, special editions of journals, numerous conference sessions and presentations on historical GIS in annual conferences of SSHA and AAG. The research on cultural geography is currently combined with historical geography, and incarnated in some aspects of print culture, geographical names and language culture, especially religious culture. Archaeology has always had a focus on the spatial dimension of human behavior, aiming to interpret human behavior and material culture in a geographic context. Then, the paper introduces some main overseas practices of developing historical cultural GIS. It holds that GIS has been applied in many fields of historical geography and cultural geography. Based on the above reviewing, finally, the authors think that scholars should recognize the function of GIS, develop GIS software, build cooperative research platform from different disciplines and areas, and make using GIS for study of history and culture become a part of plan of digital city.
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Received: 10 December 2007
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2009, Vol. 24 
