Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2020
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly popular in historical research, especially in urban contexts. However, digitizing historical sources in a way that can be mapped using the Cartesian co-ordinate systems of a GIS is often challenging, especially so in the case of records pre-dating centralized property registers or street numbering. This article explores how the vernacular spatial descriptions used in several case-studies of documents from late medieval and early modern London can be translated and geocoded into GIS compatible co-ordinates in a sympathetic way. Translating this data from a historical spatial paradigm into a modern one unlocks a whole range of new insights into spatial patterns, networks and relationships which would not have been feasible to construct using traditional methods
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1 Some recent examples of broader spatial approaches to urban history of this period include: Liddy, C.D., Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McSheffrey, S., Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400–1550 (Oxford, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berry, C., ‘“To avoide all envye, malys, grudge and displeasure”: sociability and social networking at the London wardmote inquest, c. 1470–1540’, London Journal, 42 (2017), 201–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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