Digital Geohumanities (original) (raw)

Spatial and digital turns in the humanities during the 20th Century have influenced human geography applications in geographical information systems (GIS), landscape, text, and cultural interpretation and representation, in addition to historical and contemporary modeling, network and spatial analysis methods. By the late 1930s and 1940s, the humanities were engaging with computer-based methods. A concordance to the writings of Thomas Aquinas was created by the Jesuit priest Roberto Busa and English scholar Josephine Mills, in consortium with IBM. In the 1950s, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss outlined the “three humanisms” of Western history (the rediscovery of the Greco-Roman; the repurposing of the humanistic perspective; and the discovery of everyday experience); in the 21st Century, a fourth trope digital humanism has been coined by Milad Doueihi to describe a “type of society” in which multiple types of media and texts (books, maps, multimedia, social media, games, augmented reality, 3D printing, etc.) cannot be fixed in space or time. This type of humanism has emerged in the three waves of the digital revolution and has led to a dissolution of epistemological boundaries between science and technology studies, the arts, and humanities. The first wave (1980–2010) witnessed the digitization of historical, cultural, literary, and artistic collections facilitating online research methods and pedagogy, which dovetailed with its second wave (2002–12) that largely manifested (as the quantitative revolution did in geography) in humanities computing quantification exercises, coding, digital parsing, analysis, and visualization projects. Currently, as we approach the third decade of the 21st Century (2013–25) a third wave of this revolution is cresting, with ontological tides turning, as humanities and arts discourses and tropes are now beginning to shape coding and software applications, and methodological frameworks for computing and multimedia platforms. In the first two decades of the 21st Century, the digital humanities have produced bodies of work that include digital archives, quantitative analyses, tool-building projects, the visualizations of large data sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, social media and hashtag activism and analysis, and the virtualization of literary, dramatic, and cultural texts. The spatial turn in the humanities has produced works such as Paul Carter’s, The road to botany bay: An essay in spatial history (1987). Concerning the colonization of Australia, Carter makes a clear epistemological distinction between the geographer’s space and spatial history. Franco Moretti’s distant reading and Bertrand Westphal’s geocritical tech- niques plotted the cartesian coordinates of philosophical, aggregated, real, and fictional spaces in literature. Native American writer William Least Heat-Moon (a.k.a. William Lewis Trogdon) employed a discursive, stratigraphic literary heuristic to explore the “sense of place” of a Kansas county on the American plains in PrairyErth: A Deep Map (1991). As a result, the Spatial Humanities and Deep Mapping emerged as tropes as humanities scholars engaged geospatial theory and technology. The aims of these scholarly pursuits were to transform geospatial technology’s framing of humans as entities or data points; understand the bilocality of texts in metaphorical and geographical space; and more closely consider scaled conceptions and narratives of place that are nuanced, nonreductionist, and deeply contingent.