The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship

David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, Trevor M. Harris

Indiana University Press, Jun 28, 2010 - History - 222 pages

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.

Contents

• 1 Turning toward Place Space and Time: 1
• 2 The Potential of Spatial Humanities: 14
• 3 Geographic Information Science and Spatial Analysis for the Humanities: 31
• A Challenge for GIS in the Digital Humanities: 58
• 5 Qualitative GIS and Emergent Semantics: 76
• 6 Representations of Space and Place in the Humanities: 89
• 7 Mapping Text: 109
• 8 The Geospatial Semantic Web Pareto GIS and the Humanities: 124
• 9 GIS eScience and the Humanities Grid: 143
• Toward a Research Agenda: 167
• Suggestions for Further Reading: 177
• List of Contributors: 191
• Index: 195

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship; The Spatial Humanities
• Editors: David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, Trevor M. Harris
• Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2010
• ISBN: 0253013631, 9780253013637
• Length: 222 pages
• Subjects: History / Historical Geography; Science / Earth Sciences / Geography; Social Science / Human Geography