GeoHumanities

Overview

The increasing trend of spatialisation in many disciplines within the social sciences and humanities (e.g. archaeology, art history, literary studies, sociology, anthropology) since the 1990s is brought about by the re-consideration of space as an equally important phenomenon as time where the constitution of social life is concerned. This “spatial turn” has rendered geo-humanities knowledge a key component in the theory and practice of social sciences and humanities. Geo-humanities is a dynamic and exciting domain today benefiting from the rapidly proliferating interaction between the disciplines of humanities, social sciences and geography and is continuously spurred on by fruitful challenges from the developments in digital technologies.

The principal objective of the GeoHumanities working group is to establish a linked open data registry for a wide range of freely available geospatial datasets and services on the internet applicable to humanities research. While repositories for online geospatial data and services exist, they have limitations regarding the integration of information in different sources in a meaningful way. The registry established by the working group will use semantic web technology to allow querying geospatial datasets and services in terms of their relevance and applicability for a specific geographic region and/or humanities research domain.

A second objective of the working group is to provide freely available, high-quality e-schooling about innovative digital geo-humanities practices and research methodologies as part of the #dariahTeach learning platform. The freely available e-schooling opportunities created by the working group will inform and train graduate and post-graduate students, scholars and other interested parties on new developments in and possibilities provided by the field of geo-humanities in the age of digital media.
 

External links 

You can follow the activities of the working group via their Twitter account or join their mailing list.
 

Examples of GeoHumanities projects & tools

Many Geohumanities projects rely on openly accessible resources, such as digitised maps, texts or datasets as the basis for their investigations. Many of the tools used in these projects have also been developed by the community, and are open-source and community-driven. The projects below are just a sample of some GeoHumanities projects, which explore historical understandings of place and space:

Recogito

Recogito is an online platform for collaborative document annotation. It is maintained by Pelagios, a Digital Humanities initiative aiming to foster better linkages between online resources documenting the past. In Recogito, you can upload texts and images, create annotations on your own or collaboratively with others, identify and map places mentioned in the documents and export your data in various forms, for re-use outside of the tool.

Pathways to Understanding 16th Century Mesoamerica

Supported by the Department of History at Lancaster University, this project combines interactive texts, images and maps in a series of online learning resources on the history, archaeology and geography of the Mesoamerican Postclassical and Colonial period of Central Mexico, beginning in the 14th through to the mid-16th century. The maps explore the history of the Mexica people, the nature of historic place-names across what is currently Mexico and depictions of geographic space and place.

Archaeological and Historical Event modelling

Based at the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, this working group brings together archaeologists, data scientists, historians and geographers in an effort to answer some of the questions being asked among geohumanities scholars at the moment, including whether it is possible to create event model “standards” which can be applied across disciplines, and, if so, what entities and relations would be essential for a “core” event model.