Spatial Humanities

In 2007 the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the University of Virginia (UVA) co-sponsored a symposium to explore how geography informs the humanities and vice versa. Participants included geographers who routinely engage the humanities in their research, humanities scholars who incorporate geography in their own work, and popular writers or artists who use geography to underpin key facets of their work or whose projects engage geographic ideas meaningfully in their conception or implementation (from the 2007 program).

The papers presented at that meeting have now been published as a volume of essays in:

The Spatial Humanities. GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship.

Michael F. Goodchild, University of California, Santa Barbara, notes: "Space—whether it be the space of the choreographer's dance floor, the artist's canvas, or the religious shrine—has always been important to humanist scholarship. But in recent years a virtual explosion of new data, tools, and concepts has revolutionized our ability to examine the relationships, patterns, and contexts that emerge when the human world is examined through a spatial lens. This book brings these ideas into focus for the first time, presenting a cornucopia of ideas, examples, methods, and suggestions for further reading that will be invaluable to anyone seeking to adopt a spatial approach to humanist scholarship, or to understand why it has attracted so much recent attention."

Chapters include: Turning toward Place, Space, and Time; The Potential of Spatial Humanities; Geographic Information Science and Spatial Analysis for the Humanities; Exploiting Time and Space: A Challenge for GIS in the Digital; Qualitative GIS and Emergent; Representations of Space and Place in the Humanities; Mapping Text; The Geospatial Semantic Web, Pareto GIS, and the Humanities; GIS, e-Science, and the Humanities Grid; Challenges for the Spatial Humanities: Toward a Research Agenda .

This sub-specialty in humanities research is so new that it does not yet have a main entry in major literary or philosophical encyclopedias. The best definition of Spatial Humanities may evolve in a series of lectures at UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center on Geographies of Place. The presentations I will be watching for are on “Chronographies” and the new media in historical research as well as "Snarled Megalopolis," a multi-disciplinary exploration of unplanned urban spaces such as slums and shantytowns.

Follow this link to the location of the book at Duke Libraries.

Heidi Madden, PhD