Few battles in history have been more scrutinized than Gettysburg’s three blood-soaked days in July 1863, the turning point in the Civil War. Still, there were questions that all the diaries, official reports and correspondence couldn’t answer precisely. What, for example, could Gen. Robert E. Lee actually see when he issued a series of fateful orders that turned the tide against the Confederate Army nearly 150 years ago?
Now historians have a new tool that can help. Advanced technology similar to Google Earth, MapQuest and the GPS systems used in millions of cars has made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused.
The software allows scholars to view things without the intervening topographical changes that have been made. For example Gettyburg would seem fairly unchanged, one might think, given the fact that there was no city buildings built upon the field. However, in the intervening years, a 'quarry, a reservoir, different plants and trees have been added, and elevations have changed as a result of mechanical plowing and erosion'. So visitors to the site today don't actually see what the soldiers then did. The mapping software helps rollback the changes and provides a better glimpse of the conditions during an historical event.
I'm so glad that the same tools that help scientists in biology and the physical sciences are also helping historians and other humanities and social science scholars.
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