Last month over 7,000 geographers and geographically-minded scholars came to Chicago for the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Among the scores of panels, posters, and demonstrations of digital tools coming from companies like Google and ESRI were several sessions centered on the GeoHumanities. As an historian who is using geospatial techniques in a dissertation on US-Indian relations, I went to present ongoing work. I’m glad I did.
For the uninitiated, there are few better places than the AAG to get a snapshot of what’s going on in this growing cross-disciplinary field. There was literally too much to take it all in. By my count the conference featured 40 panels under the GeoHumanities theme. Some were subject specific, involving art history, environmental studies, or literary analysis. Others were methodological, asking questions about the promise and pitfalls of geospatial analysis. Still others introduced new tools and sought to generate discussions about the software needs of humanists. They asked about the state of field. They surveyed the employment landscape. They discussed what libraries or campus institutes like the D-Lab are and can be doing to support research. And they presented works in progress like mine.
My entry to the AAG was serendipitous. Part of my dissertation involves assessing nineteenth century American settlers’ physical relationship to Indian treaty boundaries, which led me into the world of demographic modeling and to respond to a call for papers for a panel searching for common ground in geospatial research. My work wasn’t quite right for that group but the proposal was passed along and found a home on a panel organized by the geographer Karl Grossner at Stanford University.
Like the rest of the AAG, our panel, “Extending GIS for the Humanities,” was international and interdisciplinary. We were two geographers and three historians from three countries. As our session description explained, the panel aimed “to help motivate a GIScience research agenda for GeoHumanities computing, with papers presenting humanities research that has encountered—and either mitigated or perhaps overcome—conceptual and technical challenges in using GIS software.” In other words, it was about tools and applications.
On the tools front Karl Grossner discussed software called “Topotime” to improve visualizations of the temporal dimensions of historical spaces. Carsten Keßler of Hunter College, CUNY, presented on spatially and temporally linking data on artifacts from across the web. The historians talked about the challenges of using geospatial software. Christophe Mimeur of the Université de Bourgogne discussed his application of HGIS to a corpus of data on the French railway in an effort to unpack its development since 1830s. S. Wright Kennedy of Rice University and team manager on the “imagineRio” project reflected on the design hurdles of producing an open source webmap in which a range of “unknown unknowns” had to be overcome. My paper presented a suitability model that applies methods in habitat reconstruction to redistribute historical census data using ArcGIS’s geostatistical and spatial analyst extensions.
As with all conferences, the discussions between sessions were particularly useful. The morning after my paper, a GIS librarian who had heard my lament about a problem weighing variables (that I had failed to solve) struck up a conversation with me. He had an answer, potentially at least. Only in a hotel basement full of academics could “binary logistic regression” be music to someone’s ears. Hopefully I’ll have an improved model to present when the AAG comes to San Francisco next year.
Resources:
- Extending GIS in the Humanities (speakers and abstracts)
- Geospatial Resources at Berkeley