Intern experience: The intersection of GIS, Location Analytics and History

As a history student, learning about GIS and location analytics seems like another world. When I joined Gonigs, my coding skills were limited to STATA and R. How would knowledge of the Taiping Rebellion in China or the building of the Suez Canal in Egypt help when learning about GIS and location analytics? Were the critical thinking and comparative analysis skills developed through studying history in such a modern field? Over several months at Gonigs, I discovered a nuanced relationship between understanding the past, present, and future through geography.

The deliverables of location analytics and GIS application paralleled the primary sources of historical analysis. The 3D terrain maps used to save the trapped Thai children and their football coach parallel those drawn by colonial explorers a century ago. These 3D maps constructed with GIS add to a constructive working relationship between the Thai surveying team, Navy SEALs, the Department of Disaster Prevention, and foreign governments. The story of the Thai cave rescues shows the stakes of problems location analytics can help solve. For a problem that seems to exemplify contemporary location analytics, there is a key historical connection. A map of the caves surveyed in 1987 was given to GIS Company Ltd. Using contemporary technology and the information held by the historical map, they created a cave passage cross-sectional map helping divers man and carry out missions effectively.

Reverse the situation and try to solve the problem without location analytics and modern GIS and we are looking at a tragic story. Sadly there’s a lot of historical precedent for that situation. The losses to business, government, and even human life when geography is ignored remind me of ill-judged political boundaries made by foreign governments across former colonies. How might the Middle East or South Asia look today if accurate demographic and geographic data had been used to create borders? Might the borders not exist at all, creating a more free world? The more I learn about location analytics and GIS, the more I use my knowledge of history and geography. Geospatial consulting and comparative historical analysis are not as far apart as I once thought.