History & Geography Research Guide: Finding History and Geography Online Reference Books

A distinguished team of Western European scholars has written an advanced, full-length physical geography designed to be a state-of -the-art evaluation of the physical environment of Western Europe, being both retrospective and prospective in its perception of environmental change. Theunique natural and regional environments of Western Europe are discussed, as well as the physical geographic framework of the region. Particular emphasis is placed on the impact and responses of human society on the physical environment of the region which is characterized by a very high populationdensity. As an enhanced reference work it will be of enduring value.

Geographic information systems (GIS) have spurred a renewed interest in the influence of geographical space on human behavior and cultural development. Ideally GIS enables humanities scholars to discover relationships of memory, artifact, and experience that exist in a particular place and across time. Although successfully used by other disciplines, efforts by humanists to apply GIS and the spatial analytic method in their studies have been limited and halting. The Spatial Humanities aims to re-orient--and perhaps revolutionize--humanities scholarship by critically engaging the technology and specifically directing it to the subject matter of the humanities. To this end, the contributors explore the potential of spatial methods such as text-based geographical analysis, multimedia GIS, animated maps, deep contingency, deep mapping, and the geo-spatial semantic web.