ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for devising a spatial history approach for the study of political landscapes, one that foregrounds temporally and spatially referenced knowledge organization systems. It also argues for using regional systems theory as the basis for spatial analysis at the scale of the state. The chapter explores regional systems theory and gazetteer data to explain why the spatial organization of state power changed as it did in China during the Song dynasty. It proposes a framework for incorporating historical narrative, change in scale, and historical contingency into spatial analysis and visualization. The spatial political history of state power is tractable to formal modeling, analysis, and visualization because, historically, governments themselves have aspired to maintain increasingly precise data about spatial dynamics. Spatial history reveals the process of creating and maintaining territory by combining spatial analysis and visualization from geographical information systems with modeling and analysis of complex spatial arrangements in databases, in particular databases of named places known as gazetteers.
