This chapter illustrates some of that promise by presenting new conclusions about how race was created and experienced and documenting some of the “aha! moments” when never-before-seen patterns jumped off the computer screen and reframed our historical understanding. Bringing these skills and methods together, we believe we can show that a spatialized “geohumanities” 4 promises something substantively different from our previous ways of knowing space and time while it offers new insights about the dominant interpretation of racism in British Columbia history. What makes this unusual among historical GIS projects is that it also experiments with bringing this methodology into conversation with a type of scholarship that has lived in isolation and sometimes open hostility for decades: interpretive discourse analysis.
Since 2007, an interdisciplinary team of cultural historians, urban geographers, and GIS technicians, both faculty and students, have been creating and utilizing historical GIS to “expose the private sphere to public view” to get a better understanding of how race and racial space operated in Victorian-era Victoria, British Columbia. Building a spatial history using the tools of the scholar “not only creates the possibility of history becoming more collaborative,” observed Richard White, “it virtually necessitates it.” 2 This project is an exemplar of this necessity. Like Whiteread, we too want to “turn space inside out” and interpret the relationship of space to time as we build a spatial history of race between 18 in one of the key nodes of the British Empire at the peak of its power. (Photo by Sue Omerod courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, London.
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