Humanities Program Spotlight:

Brand-New Tools for Historical Research: Geographical Information Systems

In order to study the history of a place in relation to its natural and civil surroundings, one has to know, with a degree of precision determined by the questions one is asking, where it is—or was. Determining the location of places as recently as the mid-19th century can present historians with significant challenges. Associate Professor Philip C. Brown (History) employs Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and geographical information systems (GIS) software, along with traditional documentary evidence, to tackle such challenges in his research on the role of corporate forms of landholding (warichi) in early modern Japanese village society, the impact of warichi on the environment, and their relationship to economic change.

During the time period with which he is concerned, political transformations in Japan brought about substantial administrative re-organization of rural villages and attendant loss of social, economic, and demographic data that had been compiled—and kept—at the village level. By the time modern maps were compiled in the late-nineteenth century, many villages had disappeared, never making it onto a modern map, thus facing historians and historical geographers with the loss of thousands of mid-nineteenth-century Japanese villages.

For a small study region, Brown notes, "one can determine village location fairly simply through site visits, interviews with local informants, and archival research, but there are growing limitations to this approach. One problem is the mortality of informants familiar with old neighborhoods. Increased urbanization and suburban development compound the problem."; Fortunately, the Japanese government recently released data providing locations for features on its most detailed survey maps, including customary names for what people today might call a neighborhood but which appear to represent old villages.

To test the correspondence between the newly-released data and observations on the ground, Brown took GPS bearings as near as possible to the centers of "four dozen hamlets that, in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, comprised one local, sub-county district." He found that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the government data (represented by green triangles in the accompanying illustration) corresponded to his bearings (represented by red dots), and he concluded that "published government data makes a reasonable starting point for identifying the center-point latitude and longitude of mid-nineteenth-century villages." With that data in hand, he was able to cast doubt on the theory that warichi arose in response to environmental calamities such as flooding.