Article 5: Advancing Archival Research With Technology: Application to Brazoria County Schools, 1917-1921

Technology has been infused with nearly every aspect of study, including that of historical research. The ability to digitize historical documents has led to exploration of avenues to categorize them efficiently, as well as adding visualization to represent data mined from the archived documents. The combination of two technological tools, Microsoft Excel and ArcGIS, has proved powerful in organizing, categorizing, and expressing data visually in meaningful ways. The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has found its way into historical research due to its interdisciplinary nature and usefulness. Currently, Great Britain, the United States, and Belgium, among other countries, have built national historic GIS databases using the country’s census reports and other data (Gregory and Schwartz 2009). The idea of geo-referencing, or the ability to link location to information, seems appealing due to the fact that much of the information researchers encounter references location in some manner (Clough, Tang, Hall, and Warner 2011). The power of GIS lies in its ability to connect information from the temporal to the spatial by using specific attribute data of a given location.