Progress toward developing a GIS of place can only follow from an understanding of what place is, and this understanding draws on geographical theory. Here-following Agnew, Tuan, and others-we consider place as being made up of three components-location, locale, and sense of place-which are recognizable at multiple scales and vary historically as a product of social and political processes. Using the testimonies of two survivors of the Holocaust, we sketch the components of a model for a GIS of place that allows for this theory of place to be visualized and analyzed. The model is, crucially, both multi-scalar and sensitive to uncertainty, as a GIS of place needs to be able to zoom in and out of the different scales at which place is experienced, as well as capture both uncertain data and uncertainty as data. We see potential in the representations proposed for scaling up from the anecdotal to the general in the sense that any narrative can be grouped and classified according to places and scales as shown here. The challenge in developing a GIS of place along the lines we propose here is to design a new set of functionalities that can do so.
Introduction: on place and scaleIn this article, we reflect on how a GIS of place can bridge the epistemological and ontological gap between the humanities and GIScience. We do this using, as an example, a 2 close reading of two testimonies of Holocaust survivors from Italy and Hungary. Our discussion is framed in the context of the "spatial humanities," defined as the use of GIS&T, and especially GIS, in the field of the humanities. Among the challenges the humanities present to GIScience are how to deal with relative rather than absolute space and how to manage data uncertaintytwo topics that we will return to later in this article. From an epistemological perspective, the major obstacle to the successful integration of GIS&T in the humanities arise from the emphasis of the latter on qualitative data and methods, as opposed to the quantitative data and methods of GIScience; thus, qualitative research is often presented as a narrative rather than an explanatory model as is often the case in GIScience. From an ontological point of view, the humanities tend to be concerned with place rather than space. This point is especially important in the context of a discussion around the GIS of place, because agreement and understanding of what we mean by "place" is crucial in developing a GIS of place; and, conversely, there may be different models and implementation of a GIS of place depending on how place is defined. (See, for example, the concept of "deep maps" in Bodenhamer et al.2015.) While a full review of the concept of place is beyond the scope of this article (see Adams 2017 for a review), we have been influenced by the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, Donald Meinig, Doreen Massey and, before these, by Hägerstrand, Bakhtin, Braudel, and others in seeing place as the culmination and meeting point of history, geography, and the human experience. Thus, we see place as a dynamic entity, a prod...
