The Spatial Humanities : GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship

Product Description 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. Review "The first attempt to tackle the issue of the humanities as an epistemic unit head-on, and to consider what the use of GIS... can bring to them.... The technical quality of the chapters is uniformly high: side-by-side they form a wide-ranging account, admirable in its ambition and scope, and authored by contributors who are recognized experts in their fields. The documentation and footnoting are exemplary, and the reader new to the field will find the further reading sections at the end extremely valuable." ―Literary and Linguistic Computing"An exciting and useful collection that offers great potential to shape the humanities. In many important ways the volume succeeds in showing how spatial analysis might be essential for humanities scholarship and more specifically what some of the possibilities might be." ―Will Thomas, University of Nebraska"" ―"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." ―Michael F. Goodchild, University of California, Santa Barbara About the Author David J. Bodenhamer is Executive Director of the Polis Center and Professor of History at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. John Corrigan is Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of History at Florida State University. Trevor M. Harris is Eberly Professor of Geography and Chair of the Department of Geology and Geography at West Virginia University. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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