Historical GIS and Visualization: Insights From Three Hotel Guest Registers in Central Pennsylvania, 1888—1897

Historic hotel guest registers are used to extract data to map and analyze visitation patterns for commercial hotels in three small places in Central Pennsylvania during the late 19th century. In an era before the automobile, guestsheds reflect both the slow travel of the horse and wagon era and linkages via railroad networks to more distant places. Hotel registers in places off a railroad line generate different guestsheds than those on rail lines; those in county seats often show the influence of seasonal court sessions and county fairs. Although the application of a geographic information system (GIS) is useful for teasing out spatial variations in the data, temporal patterns are not so easily distinguished. This research reports on the use of Hotelviz, an integrated software for visual data analysis, to help confront the complex spatiotemporal trends that are to be found in the data.