Spatial Humanities

DH 102: Data in the Humanities

November 15, 2016

Prof. Mackenzie Brooks

Readings

• What is Spatial History?
• Visualizing the Railway Space
• What is the Spatial Turn?
• The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction

• 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

• Railroads and the Making of Modern America
• Civil War DC
• Mapping the Second Klu Klux Klan
• Negro Travelers’ Green Book
• Black Liberation 1969 Archive
• Textual Geographies

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