Humanities Data and Mapping Environments
Instructors:
David Wrisley,Voica Pușcașiu
Duration: both weeks
This spatial humanities workshop will introduce participants to different ways of thinking about humanities data, their curation within projects, and their use in digital mapping environments. The workshop will not be a traditional course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), although we will use open source GIS and web mapping along the way. The workshop is designed for the total beginner who would like to explore how a spatial dimension can enrich humanities and interdisciplinary research projects and to learn some fundamental skills for collecting and organizing data in order to be able to integrate such methods into their research workflows. Drawing inspiration from the location of the ESU in the historical center of Besançon, participants will gather data from within the city and will work with data from local cultural institutions. The workshop will also introduce students to ways in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are opening up new horizons for spatial humanities research. The workshop lasts a total of 36 hours, two weeks of 18 contact hours each.
The central goals of the workshop are fourfold:
- to learn where we might obtain spatial data relevant to our research interests, or capture data from analog sources through digitization,
- to explore modeling data for a research project having a spatial dimension,
- to practice different ways that we can tell a story by visualizing spatial data, and
- to learn ways that we can disseminate and share that data.
Week 1 In the first part of the course we conduct a critical review of a range of spatial humanities projects: their scope and the rhetorical strategies they employ for spatial storytelling and argument. We will begin by reflecting on how location-based research might be incorporated into research projects in different disciplines (cinema, art history, anthropology, history, literature, etc.) as well as the challenges of incorporating a spatial dimension into research. We will learn about the creation of data in formats relevant to spatial humanities projects (using gazetteers, mobile data collection, off-the-shelf software) as well as some basic querying in order to perform repetitive tasks for building a spatial dataset. Students will be introduced to normalization and wrangling techniques and will contrast the manual, slow creation of data with more automated forms of analysis.
Week 2 In the second part of the course, we will learn some skills in static site development so that we can host our own basic web maps. We will experiment with other automated workflows and will turn to more complex forms of visualization and storytelling. Open-source GIS software will be used to learn about georeferencing / warping and the creation of historical vector / polygon data from digitized historical maps. Depending on the time available and participant interest, we may explore other topics of interest: discipline-specific gazetteers, mapping packages in R, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, maps & IIIF, machine classification of features in historical or series maps, etc. A Zotero library of supplementary readings will be provided by the instructors.