Modeling and Visualizing Historical GIS Data

Historical GIS is quite a loose term. It can be applied to almost any data with spatial representations that change over time. Here we will greatly narrow the scope of inquiry and look at the specific problem of how to depict changes in administrative geography over the long course of history, and how to model the data in a way that enables us to visualize changing spatial patterns. Two scenarios will be examined for visualization: one, to show the administrative hierarchy from the center of government to first-level and second-level subordinate units; and another which shows single a path of movement across time. In both examples, the base dataset will be the China Historical GIS, and visualization software will be GoogleEarth.