Advancing Archival Research with Technology: Application to Brazoria County Schools, 1917-1921

The combination of two technological tools, Microsoft Excel and ArcGIS, has proved powerful in organizing, categorizing, and expressing data visually in meaningful ways. The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has found its way into historical research due to its interdisciplinary nature and usefulness. The goal of this paper is not to dispute the value of traditional historical methods, narrative and content analysis, for example, or tables and graphs, but to propose that there is information to be learned through a visual representation of data, especially data which comes from certain government, school, and industry reports and documents that have multiple pages of numeric and/or spatial data. This paper focuses on the development of a methodology and the use of technological tools to process original archived documents.