A spatiotemporal visualization of historical data

Abstract

The so-called digital humanities have become an increasingly unavoidable reality for those who work with historical knowledge. It is no longer so much a matter of questioning its possibilities of affirmation with the academic community in question, but of discussing its developments, such as the need (or not) to define some epistemological identity for the area and the theoretical and practical implications in the everyday life of the researcher and in the institutional systems of evaluation of his work. The present project aims at the design and development of a computational platform for collaborative historical research. The main idea is to develop state-of-the-art software tools, such as a web portal and Geographic Information System (GIS) plug-ins, that enable humanities researchers to create, organize, store, integrate, process and publish urban history datasets. The platform will integrate all these tools. Urban history data, as a representation of the evolution of urban spatial locations over time, are spatiotemporal data. Thus, the platform development implies many challenges in Geoinformatics: (a) how to model, store, geocode, manipulate and visualize spatio-temporal data sets; (b) how to integrate urban history information with spatiotemporal data from other areas, such as public health and mobility, that are available on the network through different providers; (c) how to define and link semantic information to a set of urban history data; and (d) how to promote collaborative work among researchers, facilitating sharing and access to knowledge. To test and validate the proposed platform, a study will be developed with a historical cartographic database of the city of São Paulo referring to the period of its urban-industrial modernization (1870-1940). The information will be organized in a spatiotemporal database. The platform will allow access to this database and the interaction between interested researchers, who in turn will be able to feed the base with data that can be represented spatially and temporally. In this way, researchers will be able to produce maps and views of their own research, at the same time that they will feed the system with their information. The aim is to create the conditions for the enrichment of the approaches of the history of São Paulo on that period, in accordance with the most recent and interesting developments of the so-called digital humanities, focused on collaborative work and the free circulation of knowledge. (AU)