1.
2The objective of the present article is to reflect on the relationships among geography, history and technologies in the contemporary world and how the connections among these three dimensions can offer different views about the human experience in the past. We understand that the environment influences the development of human societies and that landscapes are not merely a backdrop for these actions, nor should they be characterized solely by their terrain, soil and climate. Landscapes contain traces of successive generations of social groups and, in the perspective of Henry Darby, should be understood as a collection of legacies from the past (Darby, 2020). Starting from this general premise, we will analyze the influence of French historiography in Brazil, more specifically, of Fernand Braudel on current research and, furthermore, how the perspective of geohistory—facilitated in recent years by the use of historical geographic information systems (GIS)—has made it possible to perceive this interaction between humans and the environment, as espoused by H. Darby. However, this (re)encounter between time and space through technology suggests other possibilities and limitations for research. Using a reference bibliography, we will analyze and understand them as a groundbreaking innovation in historical studies, one that is fraught with challenges but that allows historians and geographers to develop new perspectives.
3In the mid-nineteenth century, chroniclers, travelers and members of the Brazilian Imperial State apparatus advocated a conception of history focused solely on political events, characterized by the chronological description of developments. The relationship between geography and history had already been considered inextricable by the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute (Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro - IHGB), founded in 1838. This institution sought to create an official and systematic record of the Empire of Brazil, and collaboration between these disciplines was espoused on the basis that they were distinct and complementary branches, albeit focused on the narrative of political events.
4The tradition that began in the nineteenth century established the division between history and geography: the former sought causal periodization (when), narrative, and the latter focused on the differentiation of spaces (where), scale, presentation and visual analysis, among other categories. Nevertheless, the interdisciplinary trends and challenges that have emerged in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have led historians to think spatially and geographers to consider the nuances of temporalities. We will address these challenges below.
5Returning to the early 1930s, with the institutionalization of the first history and geography program at the University of São Paulo (Universidade de São Paulo - USP) and later at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ), a new wind would blow across the country’s academic production, which would begin to be strongly influenced by French academia, in particular the Annales School. The new paradigms that were advocated opposed a simple narrative and encouraged a veritable war against purely political and military history, championing a historiography of the problem and, above all, interdisciplinary collaboration. Over the subsequent decades, these assumptions would bring about significant changes in the landscape of historiographical production at the major Brazilian universities, and collaboration between the disciplines of geography and history would gain new advocates. We are referring to what we conventionally call the “second generation of Annales.” Fernand Braudel, its greatest representative, gives new meaning to the legacy of Vidal de La Blanche and reintroduces geography to the study of civilizations and its crucial role for understanding history in terms of varying temporalities but primarily in terms of the longue durée (Ribeiro, 2008).
6Although Marc Bloch, founder of the Annales alongside Lucien Febvre, already recognized the importance of interdisciplinarity, the first to actually examine historical phenomena in the light of other disciplines, such as sociology and geography, was Fernand Braudel. It is he who articulates the concept of géohistoire, stating that the emergence of different social groupings depended, to a certain extent, on the diversity of regions and their natural conditions. A particular geographic reality dictates survival strategies based on climate, vegetation, topography and food availability, shaping the choices of social groups and thus their historical trajectories. Braudel, however, eschewed the determinism of geography, understanding space as a fundamental historical coordinate of social life, clearly perceptible in his Civilisation matérielle, a total history of spaces through the prism of the longue durée. Braudel valued not only static physical phenomena but spatial changes and transformations over time.
7Braudel’s contemporary, Roger Dion, also found that geography made it possible for history to shed light on vast human movements, not driven by the efforts of individuals but by forces external to the human soul. The historian identified a number of historical events in which history and geography were mutually supportive, and he therefore opposed the separation of the two disciplines in humanities curricula. For him, the humanized landscape is a reflection of history. (Dion, 1950)
8Returning to Braudel, in his 1949 work “The Mediterranean,” he develops the concept that would revolutionize the epistemology of history: the concept of the “longue durée” and its relationships not only with vast temporalities but also spatiality (Braudel, 1949). Later, F. Dosse emphasizes the importance of reviving the Annales in terms of advocating collaboration between the disciplines of history, economics and sociology and from the perspective of “anchoring historical writing in permanence, in the longue durée, in contact with geography’ [...]” (Dosse, 2003, p. 119). In other words, geography joins the other disciplines in attributing its fundamental importance to the observation of human experiences.
9Although modified, the Braudelian perspective was indebted to Vidal de La Blanche. For the former, movement was the engine of his perspective on history, while for the latter, his perspective was closer to a fixed geography. Even though their perspectives were different, there was a convergence in the notion that the environment was a dimension of the trajectory of societies and that it must be seen in terms of the longue durée, linked in time and in different spaces.
10The Braudelian influence on Brazilian historiography lasted for a considerable time, and we can venture to say that it survived the crisis of the paradigms of history in the 1990s. The interdisciplinary dialog spanned much of the twentieth century and, when it was possible to think about new interdisciplinary exchanges, with history and geography showing signs that they were “running out of steam,” new momentum comes with the re-encounter of these areas in new software, resulting from the development of new digital technologies, specifically, the technological development applied to GIS, “effectively a spatial database technology concerned with structuring, integrating, visualising and analysing spatially referenced data” (Gregory, 2007, p. 89). All this tends to encourage and benefit research in history due to the great advances in technology at the dawn of the twenty-first century but with the careful craftsmanship of historians’ productions, in order to prevent potential scientistic excesses caused by the Cartesian nature of this technology.
11An initial possibility for using the technology is related to the potential of this new approach, based on the use of new techniques and technologies, which tend to expand the technical resources of researchers in the exploration and mining of data from research sources and, in a way specific to the historiographical field, to more properly embrace the idea of cartography as a research method in history, as proposed by Braudel.
12How then do we understand the uses of this technology? The content of historical texts, their historical information, or much of it, is spatialized in layers of categorized data and therefore has the ability to be enriched both by a dynamic transition of layers and by the addition of geographic information. These adjustments of overlapping information, enabled by GIS software, increase the quality of historical analysis. Marc Bloch (Bloch, 1944), in “The Historian’s Craft,” in counterposing traditional history to new research approaches—primarily as a result of interdisciplinarity—was already asserting the importance of human traces in time and space beyond traditional and official sources. As such, physical space, represented on a map and overlaid with layers of historical information, reestablishes the spatial context of the historical information. Then, new information is produced and synthesized, revealing other traces and enabling a better understanding of remote societies.
13This new technology-driven approach to the use of GIS in history is thus a way of giving continuity—under a new methodology—to historiographical propositions, primarily with regard to interdisciplinarity and the use of other sources. There are other examples in Grava’s doctoral thesis (Grava, 2011) and in the work of Laguardia (Laguardia, 2011 and 2015) of the benefits of data integration in GIS platforms and software through the mapping and “reconstruction” of historical space in the virtual environment. The new architecture of historical data can be related to other databases and information such as landscape and physical geography data. This provides an opportunity for researchers to gain new information, either by reading the spatial patterns of the historical sources or by the constraints imposed by the physical and geographical aspects of that society, among other forms of reading. This finding is becoming ever clearer and, consequently, more important for the polyhedron of research in history. Historians are increasingly using terms such as metadata as well as meta-source.
14This means thinking about the traditional variables of the historical equation, which can now, with new ‘tools,’ reveal other geometries, or even the possibility of new variables being identified. All this is based on the technological development of GIS.
15Oscar Itzcovich, firstly, noted how using the computer for the computerization of documents in specific databases inevitably ends up generating a new source, ‘constructed’ by the historian themselves, a selective operation of documents that, in a technique [familiar to] the traditionalist historian, consists of selecting, from a large quantity of information, the few pieces that are significant for the study. (Grava, 2011, p.62)
16This new procedure enables a new approach in historical research. According to that author, through mapping, historical spaces can be reconstructed, using geographic information techniques, and it is possible to correlate the actual landscape with that of the past, in addition to the digital transition of the (document archive) source material to the intangible (digital)—the new data (meta-source), which undoubtedly represents a great innovation for historical research. The author also indicates that the spatial database is a tool that simplifies analysis within the sources synchronously and enables examination across the sources diachronically through layers and the digital map—this in the form of dissemination through Web 2.0. In a similar vein, Richardson states that historians are beginning to understand the fundamental aspects of GIS, for example, its ability to integrate, analyze and visualize large amounts of spatial and temporal data from various disciplines and sources and especially its ability to move at multiple scales—both spatially and temporally as well as geographically and historically. This ability to combine time and space in an integrated system has profound implications for research in history and geography. (Richardson,2011, p. 209)
17According to Gregory (Gregory, 2014, p. 6-8), GIS began to be used by historians with quantitative and social analysis as the primary objective. Thus, the first publication devoted to historical GIS by Social Science included essays on topics such as fertility, migration, urban history and economic growth, all well suited for quantitative analysis.
18 With regard to the historical GIS approach, Gregory notes that this procedure has been growing since the 1990s. For the author, this is due to large national projects, such as the historical GIS of Canada, Great Britain, the United States of America, Germany, China and South Korea. These laboratories sought to make available and place in space, primarily, administrative boundaries and quantitative census data since their earliest surveys. However, their complex and often time-consuming application led to the regionalization of projects and the perception of the importance of geography for different orders of questions.
19Knowles, similarly, presents this identification in detail, following her analysis of the earliest historical GIS studies: some of the first works that considered historical GIS and this perception include the 1998 meeting of the Social Science History Association (SSHA) in Chicago, USA, which resulted in the historical GIS sessions at the 1999 conference. Several of the papers presented at this meeting were published in the journal Social Science History. A few of these studies are particularly noteworthy, and we mention them here as examples and summarized models of GIS use and topics in history, such as the paper by Bertrum H. MacDonald and Fiona A. Blac, Using GIS for Spatial and Temporal Analyses in Print Culture Studies (MacDonald and Blac,fiona A. 2000), which sought to address issues ‘such as the availability of books in urban and rural areas’ and ‘the diffusion of ideas and knowledge.’ The paper Using GIS to Document, Visualize, and Interpret Tokyo’s Spatial History (Siebert, 2000) by Loren Siebert aimed to ‘visualize and interpret Tokyo’s spatial history’ using topographic elements in an analysis of urban morphology—which is carried out through a large number of sources with overlaps in time and space that show the changes in the city and the perspective of variations between elements of the urban structure individually or in their geographical context and the potential relationships established there. (Knowles,2000, p. 1-27)
20The paper by Richard G. Healey and Trem R. Stamp, Historical GIS as a Foundation for the Analysis of Regional Economic Growth (Healey and Stamp, 2000), sought to analyse regional economic growth using GIS. By studying data from individual companies and examining changes in space and time at different scales, such as at the city and state level, it is possible to see changes in economic growth and the degree of influence of economic factors and decisions. The final paper in this issue, with a groundbreaking topic, is presented by G. Willim Skinner, Mark Henderson and Yuan Jianhua, namely, China’s Fertility Transition through Regional Space (Skinner and Jianhua, 2000). It is a historical demography study that is optimized with historical GIS. The essay represents the first results of an international, multidisciplinary study that uses GIS as a key tool for modeling and analyzing variations in reproductive behavior in China. The authors use GIS and the Chinese census for a ‘multilayered spatial model of regional structure’ to explain the ‘unfolding of China’s fertility transition in regional space.’ The conclusion is that ‘key features of reproductive behavior in China vary systematically through space and time.’ In this process, there was an extensive use of quantitative data, with about 12 million pieces of data collected.
21There are some limitations on this technology that emerge in the time-space relationship: it is necessary to reflect on historical information in terms of its sources and its geographical context in order to think—often in a creative and innovative way—about its representation in space. Due to the nature of GIS software, created based on the geographer’s métier, certain subtleties involved in the reading of historical texts are not able to be represented and addressed, demonstrating some of the aforementioned limitations. As a result of this process, historical sources may present varying degrees of potentialities when they are being analyzed, but this process requires the learning and improvement of techniques and skills.
22Knowles emphasizes that converting historical sources into digital form, and in particular unsystematic qualitative sources, poses special challenges for historical scholars. In other words, historical information that, by its nature, is determined in the past differs from current geographic information—determined in the present space—and creates, when superimposed, different possibilities for historical research. Due to this different nature, technological tools produced for geographic information with the resources of the present and, therefore, current time may have limitations for representing historical information. One way to identify the aspects involving possibilities and limitations is the use of quantitative or qualitative sources and information.
23It can thus be concluded that quantitative history research seems to be the first and natural path for using information from historical sources in GIS platforms or software, in particular for the initial approaches of researchers accustomed to the traditional and/or curricular métier. Ultimately, GIS software has a mathematization characteristic of computer programs and spatial statistics not directly present in academic curricula. Nevertheless, economic historians and quantitative data specialists have—albeit tangentially—found this path through areas of mathematical expertise, for example, Ernest Labrousse’s history of prices (Labrousse, 1990) or other sometimes unpopular fields of economic history. There are thus difficulties using quantitative data in GIS software due to gaps, inconsistencies and a lack of greater detail; this difficulty, characteristic of historical sources, does not facilitate the use of qualitative information. Consequently, when historical sources are examined based on qualitative information, they are imprecise given the demands of robustly mathematized programs; furthermore, the programs do not address what is ‘between the lines,’ the intertexts, intratexts and contexts of the historical sources. According to Knowles (Knowles 2000, p. 472),
24...the problem of converting the bulk of paper historical sources into digital form, particularly unsystematic qualitative sources, poses special challenges for historical scholars, as does the problem of locating historical places and objects in order to assign them the geographical coordinates required by a GIS. (Knowles 2000, p. 472)
25Corroborating this line of reasoning, Doorn argues that linking data to spatial units is a difficult task due to the incomplete nature of historical sources. He points out that the representation of historical data cartographically is still yet to be solved when both source maps and data may have ambiguities and cover different areas and boundaries of the entire time-path. Maps may appear more convincing than is justified by the obscurity, ambiguity or incompleteness of the sources. (Doorn, 2015, p. 4)
26In turn, Gregory (Gregory 2014) notes that historians are not prepared for spatial and visual analyses of geographic information and emphasizes the need to be careful not to ‘caricature’ a map. Geographic data requires spatial precision that historical data usually lacks, and it is important not to draw conclusions from something uncertain as though it were accurate. Historians are unaware of the recent movement in cultural geography to critically analyze maps as partial representations of reality. New methods of representing spatial and temporal uncertainty are still a growing and developing field. Research is still carried out in a rigid Cartesian logic for GIS, and it is not yet sufficiently clear what constitutes a unit of historical information for use in GIS. (Knowles, 2008, P. 124-127)
27Still other limitations have emerged within geography’s critique regarding the use of GIS, as Gregory indicates:
28Opponents argued that it marked a lurch toward an unacceptable form of positivism with no epistemology or treatment of ethical or political issues. One thing on which they both agreed – or perhaps took for granted – was that GIS was a quantitative technology that was to be used in a social scientific manner (to its supporters) or a positivist way (to its antagonists). (Gregory 2014, p. 6)
29The author, however, presents many positive aspects: historical-geographical information systems (HGIS) would also be broadening their technical scope in terms of their potential application to qualitative information and quantitative data. He thus interprets this movement, ever since the initial exchanges between GIS and history, in the following way: “HGIS is deepening from an applied perspective, and it is broadening from a technical perspective.” This makes it possible to identify several qualitative trends in this movement, more related to the social sciences—which are moving away from their emphasis on technique in order to increasingly focus on answering research questions and developing new narratives. In this context, the field has deepened as the focus shifts from technique to application. (Gregory 2014, pp. 7-12)
30This dynamic movement reveals that there are still possibilities for developing this technological alignment between geography and history. An important factor for the creativity, innovation and democratic nature of this movement is the absence of a ‘center’ that rigidly defines methods, objects or even the nomenclature itself, although historical GIS is well established in the keywords. It is undoubtedly a promising movement, especially if we consider the growing demand from historians to use GIS software, a technology that is changing more rapidly every day. Additionally, there are still few studies in historiography about the uses, impacts and consequences of introducing technology in research. Even if the adversities of inputting data from historical sources into software are overcome, there are still some critical issues, attributed to the precision required from and by researchers possibly simplifying results due to the mathematical relationship. This is the issue of a potential return to an excessive positivism through a Euclidean cartography and Cartesian space or a potential return to geographic determinism, in addition to other counterpoints raised by cultural geography. Nevertheless, we believe that these issues are equally important when revisiting previous debates but now using new signs emerging from new technologies; in the end, historians and/or their research groups will always have to answer these questions. The current perception is that until a limit to technological development has been identified, there will be no traditional stability to this new alignment or approach between time and space.
31As has been extensively analyzed, the reading of time by space in GIS software, as well as the dissemination of its techniques and possibilities for exploring historical and geographic data in a virtual space in GIS software, enables a spatialization of data and information from historical sources. It establishes the place of that data and information and ultimately functions as a spatial database by adding additional layers of information to historical sources. This virtual space can be accessed individually by historians by downloading GIS software and crafting their own database, now spatial.
32Notably, it is also possible to share this database and propose collaborative work with other researchers via digital platforms. In Brazil, we have two examples currently in operation: the Pauliceia 2.0 project (Ferla et all, 2020) and the Atlas da América Portuguesa [Atlas of Portuguese America] (Gil and Barleta, 2016). These platforms are intended to share historical data and information organized by the use of GIS tools, but by sharing this information, these platforms invite researchers to collaborate with other partners, adding their database and thus also sharing their research data. The end result of this proposal is a greater democratization of knowledge as well as its ongoing validation—or not—through other studies. It is now possible to have access to what was previously only available in physical archives and seen in historical cartography. Through platforms with easily digitized and updated information in GIS software, new layers of information are brought together.
33The (re)encounter between history and geography provided by new technologies opens up a new frontier for exploring data and information from historical sources: digital cartography in GIS software and platforms. Along the most current path, it is possible to perceive the emergence of new representations of historical research in different types of approaches to address multiple temporalities and spatialities. In the lines that follow, we will present some specificities of this (re)encounter between time and space in GIS software that are already having a significant impact in Brazil, as can be seen in the remarkable book by Valencia and Gil. In it, the authors present a series of studies that serve as models for other research by using GIS tools for information from different historical sources in Brazil. Taking as an example the “Cartas de Sesmarias” [“Land Grant Letters”]—a document that designated certain land grants in the Brazilian colonial period—these grants had been represented only as points in the territorial space of the Portuguese empire. However, using GIS, it becomes possible to have more precise information by simultaneously presenting the rivers, paths, villages and mountains as boundaries as well as the area, represented spatially as polygons, in a true virtual reconstruction of the land granted. The information offered to researchers takes on a different perspective, full of other investigations and inquiries. (Valencia and Gil 2017).
34In another example, population densities gain a new perspective and can be represented as graduated patches of proportional sizes in their variations in space and time. Different crops in agricultural production are represented by different symbols, in accordance with the legend of what is intended to be the focus. In the same way, rural properties, timber areas and other features of spaces can also have their own representations. Religious temples and expressions of intangible culture, such as festivals and their cultural representations, can also be depicted. Paths can be reconstructed and a series of spatial relationships can gain meaning in the plethora of data and information that historical sources can provide.
35We question whether this methodological and technological approach ultimately provides researchers with sufficient technical conditions for the production of Total History, the ambition of the second generation of the Annales. The broad expectations have not yet been met, but the field is slowly moving in tandem with the understanding of the importance of space in historical research and the balance that historians must strike between possibilities and limitations.
36 Has Braudelian geohistorical reasoning survived the crisis of all the paradigms of postmodernism? We believe that it has and that it benefited from the technological expansion of this phase. The subject of temporalities and spatialities was enriched by the contribution of new information and communication technologies and, in particular, by the new opportunities to access and communicate research results via the internet.
37 The encounter between new technologies and scientific fields, problematized here in general terms in the encounter between GIS and research in history, tends to invite reflections on “limitations and possibilities” in the uses of new technologies in historical research. It was argued that the limitations are findings given the lack of training and/or affinity on the part of historians to address the spatialization or mathematization of their historical sources; perhaps because of this, GIS companies are not fully attentive to the demands of historians, and thus historical sources that do not have complete and detailed data and series cannot be fully incorporated into GIS software. These limitations are critical and important aspects.
38 Nevertheless, these reflections should not discourage the use of GIS in historical research. Even after twenty years of use and practice, faced with limitations and working to overcome them, often on platforms intended for historians and developed collaboratively, these limitations can and should be seen as an incentive for creativity, academic collaboration and a greater interdisciplinary relationship and technological dialog with other sectors of civil society. Indeed, the spatialization of history is one of the fields—and perhaps the leading field—on the technological frontier of research in history.
39As such, the topic has been debated in academia and leads to reflections on best uses and methodological improvements. It is important to remember, however, that limitations and possibilities are reconfigured every time there is a software upgrade or, even more broadly, a technological upgrade. These upgrades may create new problems and/or (re)define new ways of using these tools, particularly if they continue to be developed without addressing the demands of historians. This would stimulate new ideas due to the creative need for new strategies for approaching the research object—where the available options (technological development) and the historical issues that are imposed on social realities are considered. The current state of affairs is provocatively presented to the scientific community. Who will make their way to this technological front?