GIS specialists

mapping historical places, routes and boundaries

8 problems need GIS specialists

1. 01
   Where was Agade, the capital of the Sargonic empire?

   Trace palaeochannels and mounds on CORONA and other declassified imagery, and map each dated textual constraint on distance and river crossing as a probability surface.

   Places · Middle East · 2350–539 BCEalso needs archaeologists and geoscientists
2. 02
   How many people lived in China around 1600, and how many died between 1620 and 1680?

   Key every gazetteer population, land and tax figure to CHGIS county boundaries by year, so densities and trends can be mapped across the core provinces.

   Demography · East Asia · 1580–1680also needs demographers and data scientists
3. 03
   What new evidence can fix when and why five historically extinct species disappeared?

   Georeference every graded sighting and specimen of the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet and map range contraction by decade against land clearance and rail lines.

   Chronology · Global · 1500–1945also needs archivists, geneticists, data scientists, philologists, archaeologists and computational linguists
4. 04
   Which of the journeys in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla did he actually make?

   Build a dated itinerary of each stated leg and test it against plausible travel speeds by land and sea, monsoon seasons and the stated departure and arrival dates.

   Texts & authorship · Global · 1325–1355also needs philologists and computational linguists
5. 05
   How many people were killed in the Irish rising of 1641?

   Normalise place names against the Down Survey parish and barony maps so reported killings can be mapped and matched across depositions.

   Demography · Europe · 1641–1642also needs archivists and data scientists
6. 06
   Did the population of Ottoman Anatolia collapse in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

   Link villages across registers to modern coordinates through the gazetteer of Kabadayı et al. (2022), and map which settlements were abandoned rather than re-registered.

   Demography · Middle East · 1520–1700also needs archivists and demographers
7. 07
   When did the thylacine go extinct in the wild?

   Geolocate every graded sighting against road, track, settlement and land-clearance layers by decade, so that apparent refugia can be separated from where observers happened to be.

   Chronology · Pacific · 1888–2019also needs data scientists, archivists and geneticists
8. 08
   Where was Yamatai, the realm of Queen Himiko?

   Encode each reading of the Wei zhi itinerary, with its emended directions and distance units, and score the regions it predicts against the georeferenced site distribution.

   Places · East Asia · 180–280also needs archaeologists

Drafted by Claude Opus 5.5