The Spatial Humanities

Description

Applying the analytical tools of GIS to new fields of research

Geographic information systems (GIS) have spurred a renewed interest in the influence of geographical space on human behavior and cultural development. Ideally GIS enables humanities scholars to discover relationships of memory, artifact, and experience that exist in a particular place and across time. Although successfully used by other disciplines, efforts by humanists to apply GIS and the spatial analytic method in their studies have been limited and halting. The Spatial Humanities aims to re-orient—and perhaps revolutionize—humanities scholarship by critically engaging the technology and specifically directing it to the subject matter of the humanities. To this end, the contributors explore the potential of spatial methods such as text-based geographical analysis, multimedia GIS, animated maps, deep contingency, deep mapping, and the geo-spatial semantic web.

This book proposes the development of spatial humanities that promises to revitalize and redefine scholarship by (re)introducing geographic concepts of space to the humanities. Humanists are fully conversant with space as concept or metaphor—gendered space, the body as space, and racialized space, among numerous other rubrics, are common frames of reference and interpretation in many disciplines—but only recently have scholars revived what had been a dormant interest in the influence of physical or geographical space on human behavior and cultural development. This renewal of interest stems in large measure from the ubiquity of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in contemporary society. From online mapping and personal navigation devices to election night maps colored in red and blue, we are more aware than ever of the power of the map to facilitate commerce, enable knowledge discovery, or make geographic information visual and socially relevant.

GIS lies at the heart of this so-called spatial turn. At its core, GIS is powerful software that uses location to integrate and visualize information. Within a GIS, users can discover relationships that make a complex world more immediately understandable by visually detecting spatial patterns that remain hidden in texts and tables. Maps have served this function for a long time: the classic example occurred in the 1850s when an English doctor, John Snow, mapped an outbreak of cholera and saw how cases clustered in a neighborhood with a well that, unknown to residents, was contaminated. Not only does GIS bring impressive computing power to this task, but it is capable of integrating data from different formats by virtue of their shared geography. This ability has attracted considerable interest from historians, archaeologists, linguists, students of material culture, and others who are interested in place, the dense coil of memory, artifact, and experience that exists in a particular space, as well as in the coincidence and movements of people, goods, and ideas that have occurred across time in spaces large and small. Recent years have witnessed the wide application of GIS to historical and cultural questions: Did the Dust Bowl of the 1920s and 1930 result from over-farming the land or was it primarily the consequence of larger term environmental changes? What influence did the rapidly changing cityscape of London have on literature in Elizabethan England? What is the relationship between rulers and territory in the checkered political landscape of state formation in nineteenth-century Germany? How did spatial networks influence the administrative geography of medieval China? Increasingly, scholars are turning to GIS to provide new perspective on these and other topics that previously have been studied outside of an explicitly spatial framework.

Spatial humanities, especially with a humanities-friendly GIS at its center, can be a tool with revolutionary potential for scholarship, but as such, it faces significant obstacles at the outset. The term humanities GIS sounds like an oxymoron both to humanists and to GIS experts. It links two approaches to knowledge that, at first glance, rest on different epistemological footings. Humanities scholars speak often of conceptual and cognitive mapping, but view geographic mapping, the stock in trade of GIS, as an elementary or primitive approach to complexity at best or environmental determinism at worst. Experts in spatial technologies, conversely, have found it difficult to wrestle slippery humanities notions into software that demands precise locations and closed polygons. At times, applying GIS to the humanities appears only to prove C.P. Snow's now-classic formulation of science and the humanities as two separate worlds.

Introduction
1. Turning toward Place, Space, and Time / Edward L. Ayers
2. The Potential of Spatial Humanities / David J. Bodenhamer
3. Geographic Information Science and Spatial Analysis for the Humanities / Karen K. Kemp
4. Exploiting Time and Space: A Challenge for GIS in the Digital Humanities / Ian Gregory
5. Qualitative GIS and Emergent Semantics / John Corrigan
6. Representations of Space and Place in the Humanities / Gary Lock
7. Mapping Text / May Yuan
8. The Geospatial Semantic Web, Pareto GIS, and the Humanities / Trevor M. Harris, L. Jesse Rouse, and Susan Bergeron
9. GIS, e-Science, and the Humanities Grid / Paul S. Ell
10. Challenges for the Spatial Humanities: Toward a Research Agenda / Trevor M. Harris, John Corrigan, and David J. Bodenhamer
Suggestions for Further Reading
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Historical Geography
• Human Geography
• Earth Sciences
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Earth science
• Geography
• Regional geography
• Technology
• Social sciences
• Technologie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253013637
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Spatial Humanities
SPATIAL HUMANITIES
David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, editors
The spatial humanities is a new interdisciplinary field resulting from the recent surge of scholarly interest in space. It prospects a ground upon which humanities scholars can collaborate with investigators engaged in scientific and quantitatively-oriented research. This spatial turn invites an initiative focused on geographic and conceptual space and is poised to exploit an assortment of technologies, especially in the area of the digital humanities. Framed by perspectives drawn from Geographic Information Science, and attentive to cutting-edge developments in data mining, the geo-semantic Web, and the visual display of cultural data, the agenda of the spatial humanities includes the pursuit of theory, methods, case studies, applied technology, broad narratives, persuasive strategies, and the bridging of research fields. The series is intended to bring the best scholarship in spatial humanities to academic and lay audiences, in both introductory and advanced forms, and in connection with Web-based electronic supplements to and extensions of book publication.
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Edward L. Ayers, University of Richmond, USA
Peter Bol, Harvard University, USA
Peter Doorn, DANS, Netherlands
I-chun Fan, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Michael Goodchild, University of California-Santa Barbara, USA
Yuzuru Isoda, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan
Kim Knott, University of Leeds, UK
Anne Knowles, Middlebury College, USA
Andreas Kunz, Institute of European History (Mainz), Germany
Lewis Lancaster, University of California-Berkeley, USA
Gary Lock, University of Oxford, UK
Barney Warf, Kansas University, USA
May Yuan, Oklahoma University, USA
The Spatial Humanities
GIS AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITIES SCHOLARSHIP
EDITED BY
David J. Bodenhamer
John Corrigan
Trevor M. Harris
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
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2010 by Indiana University Press
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The spatial humanities : GIS and the future of humanities scholarship / edited by David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris.
p. cm. - (Spatial humanities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35505-8 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22217-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Geographic information systems-Social aspects. 2. Human geography. 3. Humanities-Social aspects. 4. Humanities-Social aspects-Methodology. 5. Memory-Social aspects. 6. Learning and scholarship-Technological innovations. I. Bodenhamer, David J. II. Corrigan, John. III. Harris, Trevor.
G70.212.S654 2010
001.30285-dc22
2009053214
1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10
Contents

Introduction
1 Turning toward Place, Space, and Time
Edward L. Ayers
2 The Potential of Spatial Humanities
David J. Bodenhamer
3 Geographic Information Science and Spatial Analysis for the Humanities
Karen K. Kemp
4 Exploiting Time and Space: A Challenge for GIS in the Digital Humanities
Ian Gregory
5 Qualitative GIS and Emergent Semantics
John Corrigan
6 Representations of Space and Place in the Humanities
Gary Lock
7 Mapping Text
May Yuan
8 The Geospatial Semantic Web, Pareto GIS, and the Humanities
Trevor M. Harris, L. Jesse Rouse, and Susan Bergeron
9 GIS, e-Science, and the Humanities Grid
Paul S. Ell

10 Challenges for the Spatial Humanities: Toward a Research Agenda
Trevor M. Harris, John Corrigan, and David J. Bodenhamer

Suggestions for Further Reading
List of Contributors
Index
Introduction
This book proposes the development of spatial humanities that promises to revitalize and redefine scholarship by (re)introducing geographic concepts of space to the humanities. Humanists are fully conversant with space as concept or metaphor-gendered space, the body as space, and racialized space, among numerous other rubrics, are common frames of reference and interpretation in many disciplines-but only recently have scholars revived what had been a dormant interest in the influence of physical or geographical space on human behavior and cultural development. This renewal of interest stems in large measure from the ubiquity of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in contemporary society. From online mapping and personal navigation devices to election night maps colored in red and blue, we are more aware than ever of the power of the map to facilitate commerce, enable knowledge discovery, or make geographic information visual and socially relevant.
GIS lies at the heart of this so-called spatial turn. At its core, GIS is a powerful software that uses location to integrate and visualize information. Within a GIS, users can discover relationships that make a complex world more immediately understandable by visually detecting spatial patterns that remain hidden in texts and tables. Maps have served this function for a long time: the classic example occurred in the 1850s when an English doctor, John Snow, mapped an outbreak of cholera and saw how cases clustered in a neighborhood with a well that, unknown to residents, was contaminated. Not only does GIS bring impressive computing power to this task, but it is capable of integrating data from different formats by virtue of their shared geography. This ability has attracted considerable interest from historians, archaeologists, linguists, students of material culture, and others who are interested in place, the dense coil of memory, artifact, and experience that exists in a particular space, as well as in the coincidence and movements of people, goods, and ideas that have occurred across time in spaces large and small. Recent years have witnessed the wide application of GIS to historical and cultural questions: did the Dust Bowl of the 1930s result from over-farming the land or was it primarily the consequence of long term environmental changes? What influence did the rapidly changing cityscape of London have on literature in Elizabethan England? What was the relationship between rulers and territory in the checkered political landscape of state formation in nineteenth-century Germany? How did spatial networks influence the administrative geography of medieval China? Increasingly, scholars are turning to GIS to provide new perspective on these and other topics that previously have been studied outside of an explicitly spatial framework.
Spatial humanities, especially with a humanities-friendly GIS at its center, can be a tool with revolutionary potential for scholarship, but as such, it faces significant obstacles at the outset. The term humanities GIS sounds like an oxymoron both to humanists and to GIS experts. It links two approaches to knowledge that, at first glance, rest on different epistemological footings. Humanities scholars speak often of conceptual and cognitive mapping, but view geographic mapping, the stock in trade of GIS, as an elementary or primitive approach to complexity at best or environmental determinism at worst. Experts in spatial technologies, conversely, have found it difficult to wrestle slippery humanities notions into software that demands precise locations and closed polygons. At times, applying GIS to the humanities appears only to prove C. P. Snow s now-classic formulation of science and the humanities as two separate worlds.
One of the problems, perhaps the basic problem, is that GIS was not developed for the humanities. It emerged first as a tool of the environmental sciences. Oriented initially around points, lines, and polygons, it found quick acceptance in the corporate world and, with its close cousin, GPS, spawned a host of location-based services. Its uptake in the academy was slower, although by the 1980s it was possible to speak of a spatial turn, a re-emergence of space and place as important concepts in the social sciences, driven in large measure by GIS and other spatial technologies. Humanities too experienced a spatial turn-and a temporal turn in the New Historicism-but its spaces and places were metaphorical rather than geographical constructions. Although GIS has gained a small foothold in specialty areas such as historical GIS, the technology that drove a social science agenda for two decades had little salience for humanists, who saw scant potential in it for answering the questions that interested them.
Significantly, the discipline that provided the home for much GIS development and application, geography, found itself divided over the technology in ways that mimicked the concerns expressed by humanists about quantitative methods generally. The central issue was, at heart, epistemological: GIS privileged a certain way of knowing the world, one that valued authority, definition, and certainty over complexity, ambiguity, multiplicity, and contingency, the very things that engaged humanists. From this internal debate, often termed Critical GIS, came a new approach, GIS and Society, which sought to reposition GIS as GIScience, embodying it with a theoretical framework that it previously lacked. This intellectual