Calculations

The "Observations" section walks you through the basics of what we are calling elementary spatial analysis. This section wades in a bit deeper and introduces some of the basic - yet powerful - tools brought to bear by GIS software. The way I think of it, GIS enables us to do two kinds of work:

First, it allows us to answer spatial questions by performing tasks we might conceivably have been able to perform without the assistance of sophisticated algorithms. The human race did not need GIS software, for example, to calculate the area of a province. Even in the 19th century, there were men (yes, they were all men) willing and able to pull off that feat. Think of GIS as endowing all men - and women! - with the ability to calculate areas (for example), no matter how complex the perimeter geometries; to do so with astonishing speed, accuracy, and the ability to scale at will.

Second, it allows us to answer spatial questions we might not have thought to pose had technology not intervened. While it might have occurred to me to wonder how big Tavrida province was, for example, it might not have occurred to me to calculate the average distance between each village in the province and the provincial town, and to do the same for each province of the empire so that I could get a kind of rough index of proximity to imperial authority. It surely wouldn't have occurred to me to run a kernel density analysis, or to calculate the cost distance between two locations. There are countless examples.

With that in mind, here goes! The initial installment of "Calculations" consists of 6 sections (listed on tabs on the right). All 6 will be available by the end of August 2016.

Toolkit Note: These "Calculations" were executed using ArcMap (thanks to the Harvard license maintained by the Center for Geographic Analysis), but all of these functions can be executed using comparable open source software such as QGIS, and even some web-based mapping platforms such as CartoDB.