Mapping is forming a large part of our digital humanities initiative. Through an excellent in-house tool that layers over the Google Maps API we have students engaged in building thematically content rich maps. A course in Classics maps aspects of the ancient world. An English class pinpoints locations in London from contemporary novels that the students are reading. An art history class examines Rome during the high renaissance and realizes through overlays of historic maps that the Rome of that period was a desolate shell of the imperial Rome that existed hundreds of years prior.
We know maps as visual representations that identify locations in a geographic space. Mapping is easy to grasp. GIS is not. While an annotated Google Map that pulls data via an API from a Google Docs spreadsheet or another source is a rudimentary Geographic Information System, the automated task of enabling pin placement on a map merely scratches the surface of geospatial visualization in the huamnities.
Is GIS even the right term within the humanities? With its basis in the sciences and social sciences and the need for exact precision of data, GIS presents an intimidating learning curve before a potential user even realizes the possibilities of the software. And that’s the key: understanding the possibilities of thinking in terms of place, the spaces that comprise a location, the attributes distinguishing each spot, and the relationship among those elements as they consist in a neighborhood, a city, or a broader area.
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