In today’s increasingly electronic age, digital mapping has become an important tool of historical scholarship, allowing historians to not only share information but to present it in different ways that facilitate new interpretations and conclusions. Conveying historical information through interactive, electronic maps adds a spatial component to the information, allowing readers to locate it within geographically defined context and thus examine how geography influences trends in this data. Mapping the information creates an explicit link between the geographical and historical context of the data, and encourages a holistic approach in which the historian can compare the data to other data based on the relevance of its proximity.

The ability of historians to map data is contingent on a process called ‘distant reading’ which involves using computers to process huge quantities of text and to detect relevant information according to pre-determined criteria. Cameron Blevins used this method to process 20,000 pages of late nineteenth century editions of the Houston Daily Post to detect how often certain geographic place-names were cited. In doing so, he was able to construct an ‘imagined geography’ of the newspaper, and to illustrate this on a map- indicating to viewers how newspapers helped to construct the geographic context of the U.S in the minds of its readers. This map allowed Blevins to present to viewers the geographic awareness of Texans in the late nineteenth century, illustrating how they perceived the country around them. A great advantage of digital mapping is that it allows scholars to reach counterintuitive conclusions, and this can be demonstrated in the case of Blevins’ study. The Southeastern states, despite their geographic proximity to Texas, were largely ignored by the newspaper, whereas the Midwest and the Northeastern states, which had significant commercial and cultural links to Houston, featured prominently. The use of mapping here shows viewers how the imagination of Texans during this period were not confined to a regional outlook, indeed their perception of the United States was guided by the commercial and political links that Texas had developed with industrious areas of the Midwest and Northeast.

Mapping spatial information thus allows historians to examine patterns and trends in human history that would otherwise be indistinguishable if they were simply presented in their raw form. Through a digital map, historians can take any particular subject, be it religious affiliation, political preferences or extra-legal murders, and to examine how overall trends in these issues are influenced by both geographic location and the passage of time. An excellent example of this can be found in the Indiana University Digital Atlas of American Religion. This digital map allows users to analyse the changing patterns in religious affiliation according to a range of criteria such as support for bible colleges, church attendance and religious families. Furthermore, the map allows users to filter results according to different demographic principles such as race, income, age and education. Thus users can add or remove layers of information to the digital map to create results tailored to their specific study. A historian interested, for example, in the relationship between median household income and religious affiliation in Hispanic families in California can, with a few clicks, quickly distil the maps vast range of information to only present relevant information. With further filtering, this information be compared to, say, white families in California, or Hispanic families in New York, allowing the historian to examine how religious affiliations varied across race, class, time and location. Digitization vastly increases accessibility of information and flexibility of research, allowing users to instantly compare chunks of information across time and space according to individual research interests.

Another great advantage of digital maps is that they allow users to detect changes over time according to geographic location. Digital maps can store a vast quantity of information, allowing historians to analyze trends across countless locations and large time periods to detect overall changes in historical phenomena. The fact that these historical changes are presented in the clear visual setting of a digitized map only increases the utility of these maps for historians, as they can analyze the relationship between historical time periods and specific locations in regards to the subject being studied.

The opportunities that digitized maps offer to the historical profession are endless. The technological innovations of these maps allows for information to be stored and presented in clear visual dimension that also allows users to add and remove layers of criteria to filter results based on their own individual preferences. Over time, increasing use of digital maps will allow historians to reach counterintuitive conclusions about subjects long considered redundant in terms of historical debate.