ABSTRACT
Over the last several decades, the digital spatial humanities field has used temporal and spatial assertions as a way to understand and visualise human activity. However, this has not extended to the geography of the physical world or to the temporality of weather and climate. By and large, spatial history projects have until now assumed that the physical landscape is static. This article offers theory, method, exemplars, and a vision for moving forward. This article details the types and scales of environmental information that are needed for long-term and large-scale spatial environmental history, along with the related scholarly challenges: (1) designing queries across data structures and semantics and (2) accommodating missing and ambiguous data values. We also introduce three exemplars. One is the Tracks of Yu Digital Atlas, and another is an initiative by Pleiades to build time-enabled map tiles for the ancient Mediterranean, including dynamic representations of coastlines and river systems. The final exemplar is the World Historical Gazetteer, a linked open data initiative for organising information about historical place-names.
