GeoHumanities: A proposal for an ADHO SIG

Karl Grossner (Stanford University) and Kathy Weimer (Texas A & M University)
4 August 2013
Introduction
The recent emergence and establishment of the field, GeoHumanities, also known as
Spatial Humanities, is confirmed in the publication of founding texts in the field:
GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (Dear, et al 2011); The Spatial
Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Bodenhamer, Corrigan and
Harris 2010); and Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the
Humanities (Daniels, et al 2011). These follow a series of works on historical GIS
(HGIS) over the last ten years or so, including Anne Knowles Past Time, Past Place:
GIS for History (2002), and Placing History (2008), Historical GIS (Gregory and Ell
2007), and several others.
As both open source and proprietary mapping technologies have become ubiquitous,
scholars have been increasingly enabled to explore questions of place and geographic
connections and contexts that had not before been asked. The field of GeoHumanities is
multi- and cross-disciplinary, engaging scholars in the arts, literature, culture, religion,
and history, often in collaboration with researchers and practitioners in the information
sciences.
Although a growing proportion of digital humanities research addresses spatial and
temporal questions, the shortcomings of existing geospatial software are a common
refrain. Space and time are more readily handled than place and temporality, but there is
no reason to simply accept the status quo; what geographic information systems (GIS) are
or become is truly a function of requirements expressed by multiple communities of
interest, including our own.
An ADHO special interest group (SIG) will make an excellent venue for pooling
knowledge and best practices for relevant existing digital tools and methods, for fostering
collaborative development of shared resources and new tools and extensions to geospatial
software, and for informing humanist scholars at large about possibilities and inherent
pitfalls in their use. The initial vision for the SIG is inclusive of spatial, spatial-temporal
and placial perspectives, and the Geo- prefix for its name reflects all of those, as
explained below.
Representing space, place, and time in digital historical gazetteers
The idea for this SIG followed the shared observation that many DH projects entail
gazetteer data development, particularly the identification of place names in texts and on
historical maps and the geo-referencing of them in order to analyze patterns, construct
narratives, and produce maps. Digital historical gazetteers are increasingly viewed as
both essential elements of humanities cyber-infrastructure and scholarly products in their
own right (Bol 2011). Their development presents some difficult conceptual and
technical challenges that are active research topics for scholars in distinct domains: the
information and computer sciences, and such humanistic fields of application as history,
archaeology, literature, linguistics, and classical studies. There are a number of historical
gazetteer projects currently in progress, large and small, and it will be extraordinarily
helpful to a great many humanities scholars if projects at all scales can ultimately join a
federated system having global coverage for all time periods. Towards that end, it will be
useful to have a forum for this multi-disciplinary community of interest.
Furthering cross-disciplinary synergy
Digital historical gazetteers are spatial-temporal reference systems. Their purpose is, at
minimum, to resolve attested place names to temporally indexed locations, but they also
commonly store and index a much broader range of place knowledge than spatial
location. The holistic merging of spatial, temporal, and thematic dimensions has a long
tradition in Geography, and is in fact a defining characteristic of the discipline (cf. the
geographic matrix, in Berry 1964). Conceptual theory, formal systems, and algorithms
for unifying these dimensions in computational systems are key to representing and
analyzing dynamic systems at geographic scales, and have been one of the more active
areas of research in Geographic Information Science (GIScience) since the inception of
that field in the early 1990s (Goodchild 1992; McMaster and Usery 2005; Yuan and
Hornsby 2008). There is also a sizable research community focused on geo-spatial
semantics, with considerable attention given to gazetteers
1
. A fair amount of this research
on dynamics and semantics is relevant to the representation challenges facing geo-
humanists, and one goal of the SIG will be to make such associations more evident and
productive.
Beyond gazetteers: Issues of space, place, time, technologies and understanding
The impetus for a GeoHumanities SIG in ADHO is not limited to the requirements for
gazetteer development. The following is a preliminary list of additional topics concerning
spatial and temporal representations and analysis:
Indeterminate and uncertain extents in space and time
o Formal representations: qualitative and quantitative
o Computational operations: adjacency, containment, similarity
o Spatial: regions; contested boundaries
o Temporal: periods, eras, reigns
Digital mapping platforms, technologies, functions, and interface issues (e.g.
search, text integration)
Teaching with maps
Understanding space and place
Spatialization (spatial visualization for non-spatial data)
Potential SIG Activities
The overarching goals of the GeoHumanities SIG will be to promote the development of
shared resources and services and software tools of general use to the DH community,
and to facilitate more and better communication and interaction between researchers in
the information sciences (geographic, library), computer science and the humanities.
Some specific objectives:
Highlight successful projects and collaborations, as a method of mentoring and
training members; share the work and expertise of the members

1
As one example, note the upcoming ACM-SIGSPATIAL workshop on Computational Models of Place
(http://stko.geog.ucsb.edu/comp2013/)
Promote formation of technology working groups having concrete development
objectives
Given community interest, serve as a communication venue for global digital
humanities gazetteer development
Publicize opportunities for collaborations; foster and publicize relevant
workshops and conference tracks
Seek funding to build collaborative projects
Specific means for achieving these will include a web site (self-hosted), with features
such as:
Aggregating relevant blog feeds
Community-annotated bibliography
DH Commons feed filtered for spatial-temporal projects
Relation to existing ADHO efforts
ADHO sponsors several educational initiatives, including institutes and tutorial
workshops, intended to help humanities scholars learn how to choose and implement
existing technologies and digital methods. The GeoHumanities SIG will of course
support and publicize such efforts related to our themes, but also aim at supporting the
development of common resources, generalized tools and standards for digital spatial and
temporal representation.
Structure
Kathy Weimer (Texas A & M) and Karl Grossner (Stanford) are co-organizing the
preliminary formation of a GeoHumanities SIG. Upon approval, we will propose that a
small steering committee be formed to begin discussion of concrete next steps.
The following individuals present at DH2013 expressed an interest in membership:
Jean Bauer Brown University
Merrick Lex Berman Harvard University
yvind Eide University of Oslo
Diane Jakacki Bucknell University
Janelle Jenstad University of Victoria
Ian Johnson University of Sydney
Worthy Martin University of Virginia
Elijah Meeks Stanford University
Ruth Mostern University of California, Merced
Bethanie Nowviskie University of Virginia
Christian-Emil Ore University of Oslo
Meg Roland Marylhurst College
Deb Verhoeven Deakin University
Willeke Wendrich University of California, Los Angeles
Michael Widner Stanford University
A draft of this proposal has prompted strong expressions of support from many
individuals on this list as well as from co-editors of GeoHumanities, Michael Dear (UC
Berkeley) and Sarah Luria (Holy Cross), and co-PI of the Pelagios gazetteer project,
Elton Barker (Open University, UK).
Works cited
Berry, B. (1964) Approaches to regional analysis: A synthesis. Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 54 (1): 211
Bodenhamer, D., Corrigan, J. & Harris, T.M. (Eds.) (2010). The spatial humanities: GIS
and the future of humanities scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bol, P. K. (2011). What do humanists want? What do humanists need? What might
humanists get? In M. Dear, J. Ketchum, S. Luria, & D. Richardson (Eds.) (2011).
GeoHumanities: art, history and text at the edge of place. London; New York:
Routledge.
Daniels, S., DeLyser, D., Entrikin, J. N. & Richardson, D. (Eds.) (2011). Envisioning
landscapes, making worlds: Geography and the humanities. New York:
Routledge.
Dear, M., Ketchum, J., Luria, S. & Richardson, D. (Eds.) (2011). GeoHumanities: art,
history and text at the edge of place. London; New York: Routledge.
Goodchild, M. F. (1992). Geographic information science. International Journal of
Geographical Information Science, 6(1): 31-45.
Gregory, I. N. & Ell, P. S. (2007). Historical GIS: Technologies, methodology and
scholarship. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Knowles, A. K. (Ed.) (2008). Placing history: How maps, spatial data, and GIS are
changing historical scholarship. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press.
Knowles, A. K. (Ed.) (2002). Past time, past place: GIS for history. Redlands, CA: ESRI
Press.
McMaster, R. B. & Usery, E.L. (Eds.). (2005). A research agenda for geographic
information science. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Yuan M. & Hornsby, K. S. (2008). Computation and visualization for understanding
dynamics in geographic domains: A research agenda. Boca Raton FL: CRC
Press.



Contact information
Karl Grossner, PhD
Digital Humanities Research Developer
Stanford University Libraries
Meyer Library
560 Escondido Mall (260A)
Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 463-6137
karlg@stanford.edu
www.kgeographer.org
Katherine H. Weimer
Professor
Co-Editor, Journal of Map & Geography Libraries
Curator of Maps, Cushing Memorial Library & Archives
Coordinator, Map & GIS Library
Texas A & M University Libraries
5000 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843-5000
(979) 845-6588
k-weimer@library.tamu.edu