Spatial Humanities

DH 102: Data in the Humanities

November 15, 2016

Prof. Mackenzie Brooks

Readings

  • 2-3 main points of the article
  • 1 thing you didn't quite understand
  • 1 question for the rest of the class to answer

What is Spatial History?

  • Time and space are connected
  • "Spatial relations shift and change. Space is itself historical."
  • Representations of space vs. representational space (space experienced through symbolic associations)
  • Spatial relations are about movement (remember that maps are ultimately static)
  • GIS is also representational
  • Absolute space = actual distances + measurements
  • "means of doing research"

What is the Spatial Turn?

  • Disciplines care about space, and have for a long time, but GIS changed the game
  • Disciplines care about space in different ways
  • The "turn" is an evaluation of the thinking of a discipline
  • "Spatial turn represents the impulse to position these new tools against old questions."
     

Visualizing the Railway Space

  • Visualization is interpretation (via mental models).
  • Space AND time are visualized.
  • What about the novel as work of art?
  • How do you map fictional places?

The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction

  • Good research question: how can we define/assess the geographic imagination of American fiction around the Civil War?
  • Two narratives/frameworks: American Renaissance (1850s) and post-Civil War Regionalism
  • US place names correlate to population (to some degree)
  • Rise of regionalism, as previously understood, is questionable
  • "aggregation involved almost inevitably damps the magnitude of the observed shift"
  • See methods section!

Methodology Review

Unit 3 project

  • Use existing data set or create your own?
  • Use new data or familiar data?
  • Use historical map or not?
  • What type of map?
    • Storytelling
    • Movement
    • Boundaries
    • Dropped pins
  • Projects
  • Tools
  • Tutorials
  • Places to go for data
  • Places to go for maps
  • Readings

Unit 3 Research Collab

  1. Scour our readings + project websites
  2. Check out DH aggregators like:
    • DH+lib
    • Digital Humanities Now
    • DH journals
    • DH centers (Scholars' Lab, Stanford, etc
  3. Informed Googling
  4. Ask your network

 

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