A case study on the use of GIS in archaeology. Presented by Stuart at a Research Data seminar on GIS , which took place at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on 17th March 2014

1. Monumental
mapping
GIS and
Hadrian’s Wall
Stuart Dunn
King’s College London
stuart.dunn@kcl.ac.uk

2. • Vector – points, lines and polygons
• Ratser – pixels with attributes
• GIS allows us to query and overlay data with
geographic coordinates
• “A map on top of a database”

3. • Everything happens somewhere
• Historical sources refer to place in many different
ways
• Associating exact location with these is complex
• Georeferencing
• Accuracy versus precision
• Relative versus absolute

4. e.g. roads, rivers
e.g. places
e.g. countries,
territories etc
Vector GIS

5. Source: http://www-eio.upc.edu/~pau/?q=node/18

7. • ArcView x.x – ESRI; proprietary
• GRASS – www.grass.osgeo.org
• Quantum GIS -
http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-
gis/wiki/Download
• Google Earth – www.earth.google.com
• Open Street Map - http://www.openstreetmap.org

8. Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) is considered
a special case of an intermediary discourse: information is
not fixed, it can be extended, altered, or even deleted at
any time. This multi-stage, reflective character has to taken
into consideration in a discourse- analytical approach.
C. Fink, 2011 - Mapping Together : On collaborative implicit cartographies,
their discourses and space construction.

13. AD 1250 – Matthew Paris (Image source - British Library)

14. Antonine Wall, c. 1906

16. E.g. search for Chollerford
GeoNames

19. Introduction: What is GIS? Vector & unique identifiers, APIs and openstreetmap

21. Introduction: What is GIS? Vector & unique identifiers, APIs and openstreetmap

22. Introduction: What is GIS? Vector & unique identifiers, APIs and openstreetmap

23. Introduction: What is GIS? Vector & unique identifiers, APIs and openstreetmap

24. Introduction: What is GIS? Vector & unique identifiers, APIs and openstreetmap