About
Dr. J.B. (Jack) Owens
When J. B. Owens walked into the early Friday morning session at the 2006 American Historical Association (AHA) meeting, it pleased him to see a packed room of people excited to hear the College of San Antonio discussion of their GIS-based world history pedagogical project (http://sacarcims.sac.alamo.edu/default.htm). But it shocked him when the presentation opened with a quotation from his 1999 World History Association (WHA) paper about using geographic information systems (GIS) for world history (based on a 1998 funding proposal). When leaving the session a few hours later, a prominent world-systems sociologist asked Owens, “How does it feel to be recognized as a prophet, ahead of your time?” Owens stammered a response about how there were several other people in the room who had played more important roles in stimulating interest in the use of GIS for historical research and teaching. He thought, however, that all of this interest, including the strong response to their 2004 AHA paper about Idaho State University’s innovative, GIS-based Master’s degree program (Owens and Woodworth-Ney 2005), presented a challenge because the discipline lacked an adequate research infrastructure to prepare historians, historical social scientists, and their students for this type of work. This GIS training manual constitutes a partial response to Owens’s concern. It offers tutorials that will introduce historians to the basic elements of GIS. The first ten chapters use a free, open-source GIS software package so that interested researchers, teachers, and students can try the technology without cost.
The training manual this website offers for free was proposed as part of the collaborative project “Understanding Social Networks within Complex, Nonlinear Systems: Geographically-Integrated History and Dynamics GIS [SOCNET]”, which was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0941371 ($1,290.704; lead project Principal Investigator Dr. J. B. Owens, Idaho State University) and No. 0941501 ($471,193; Principal Investigator Dr. May Yuan, University of Oklahoma), for a total award of $1,761,897 (2009-2013).
This work is provided as part of the project “Understanding Social Networks within Complex, Nonlinear Systems: Geographically-Integrated History and Dynamics GIS [SOCNET]”, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0941371 and No. 0941501. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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