Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Understanding Cumulative Hazards In A Rustbelt City: Integrating Gis, Archaeology, And Spatial History, Daniel Trepal, Don Lafreniere

Michigan Tech Publications

We combine the Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) concept developed within spatial history with elements of archaeological predictive modeling to demonstrate a novel GIS-based landscape model for identifying the persistence of historically-generated industrial hazards in postindustrial cities. This historical big data approach draws on over a century of both historical and modern spatial big data to project the presence of specific persistent historical hazards across a city. This research improves on previous attempts to understand the origins and persistence of historical pollution hazards, and our final model augments traditional archaeological approaches to site prospection and analysis. This study also demonstrates …