ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the potential of digital mapping or Historical GIS as a research and teaching tool with potential to describe the spatial, kinetic, and sensory dimensions of early modern urban societies. Using both the Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive (DECIMA) project and Hidden Florence, the chapter described how digitally inflected scholarship emerges and expands through technical challenges and ongoing revision. It shows how emerging critical questions and expanding technical possibilities bring researchers back to the drawing board time after time. Approaches that seem feasible frequently have to be abandoned due to limits in the sources or technology. The chapter demonstrates how digital projects can promote collaboration; allow scholars to extend their research within a field, and shift the questions and subject matter both within a particular area of research and in historical study generally. It sketches the historical and historiographical context for the DECIMA project and then explains how the project developed.
