Persistence or Transience ? Tracking

Numerous implementations for modeling geographic information across time have been developed, many of them specifically tuned to a particular kind of data or analysis. In the field of historical geography, several largescale national projects have been undertaken, and each of these has demonstrated the sharp contrast between scientific solutions for handling time series datasets and the ad-hoc methods created to deal with amorphous objects known as “historical places.” This paper examines the nature of those “historical places” as they change over time and whether they should be defined as persistent historical entities or as transient entities formed from an interconnected series of historical instances.