Geospatial NarrativePerspectives from the humanities,

cartography and GIScience

Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR)Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA)May 7, 2015

panelists• David O’Sullivan

– Professor of Geography, UC Berkeley• Anne Knowles (w/Levi Westerveld)

– Professor of Geography, Middlebury College• Erik Steiner

– Cartographer, Geographer; Creative Director, Spatial History Project• Nicole Coleman

– Research Director, Humanities + Design• Nicholas Bauch

– Geographer, Postdoc @ Spatial History• Karl Grossner

– Geographer, DH Developer @ CIDR

questions• Does historical simulation open significant untapped avenues

for new historical spatial narratives or is it too reductionist to be accepted by/useful to humanists?

• Is there a place for performative art in the spatial humanities? Or does art lack the empirical and representational rigor that is necessary to comprehend data and derive meaning?

• what does “spatial narrative” mean?• how does it differ from verbal narrative: is that even a

meaningful distinction? a genuine binary?• what’s missing or inadequate in existing tools, models,

methods?

Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR)

• The Academic Technology Specialist team, working directly in and with selected academic departments to improve teaching, learning, and research by implementing and developing new technologies.

• Social Science Data and Software offers data, software, workshops, and consultations for data-based social science research and teaching.

• Digital humanities research developers provide focused project support for the Stanford scholarly community via an annual call for proposals. The DH developer team maintains a rich gallery of projects both already published and in-progress.

• The Humanities Text Service (hText) provides access to textual and other digital resources for research and teaching.

Narrative

• account, story, tale, chronicle• “An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in

order and with the establishing of connections between them”

• “A representation of a history, biography, process, etc., in which a sequence of events has been constructed into a story in accordance with a particular ideology”

• geospatial narrative: one product of the practice of both spatial history and historical geography

Spatial History Project

Spatial History Project

SPACE

TIME

THEME

The Geographic MatrixApproaches to Regional Analysis: A SynthesisBrian J. L. Berry, Univ. of Chicago, 1964

Perspectives and definitions

space

time

theme

“…the intersection of qualitative geographic information systems (GIS), narrative analysis, 3D GIS-based time-geographic methods, and computer-aided qualitative data analysis.”

“I suggest that the more successful examples of critically informed GIS are those where researchers informed by social theory have been willing to engage with the technology, rather than to criticize from the outside.”

questions• Does historical simulation open significant untapped avenues

for new historical spatial narratives or is it too reductionist to be accepted by/useful to humanists?

• Is there a place for performative art in the spatial humanities? Or does art lack the empirical and representational rigor that is necessary to comprehend data and derive meaning?

• what does “spatial narrative” mean?• how does it differ from verbal narrative: is that even a

meaningful distinction? a genuine binary?• what’s missing or inadequate in existing tools, models,

methods?