Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Humanities GIS,”
International Journal of Humanities and Arts Comput-
ing
1 (2007): 97-110 and the collection of essays in D. J. Bodenhamer,
J. Corrigan, and T. M. Harris, eds.,
The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the
Future of Humanities Scholarship
(Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2010) represent the irst serious atempts to frame this ield. he
potential uses of geographical data have, however, been recognized for
much longer than this, with the use of spatial data as metadata being
seen as particularly important, as shown by D. M. Smith, G. Crane, and
J. Rydberg-Cox, “The Perseus Project: A Digital Library for the Humani-
ties,”
Literary and Linguistic Computing
15 (2000): 15-25.
As the majority of sources used by humanities scholars are unstruc-
tured texts, the major challenges at present are first to work out how to
convert these into a form suitable for GIS, which typically requires its
atribute data to be in tabular form, and second, and more importantly,
to explore what these texts have to offer to advance the disciplines that
they are applied to such that, as with history, the research becomes of
interest to people with no inherent interest in GIS or perhaps even in ge-
ography. At least three groups of researchers have taken on the challenge
of how to convert texts to GIS format. These are C. Grover, R. Tobin,
K. Byrne, M. Woollard, R. Reid, S. Dunn, and J. Ball, “Use of the Edin-
burgh Geoparser for Georeferencing Digitized Historical Collections,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A
368 (2010): 3875-89;
I. N. Gregory and A. Hardie, “Visual GISting: Bringing Together Cor-
pus Linguistics and Geographical Information Systems,”
Literary and
Linguistic Computing
26 (2011): 297-314; and M. Yuan, “Mapping Text,”
in Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris,
The Spatial Humanities,
109-23.
At least two papers have explored the potential that mapping texts
offers to develop new scholarship, albeit applied to very different top-
ics. D. Cooper and I. N. Gregory, “Mapping the English Lake District:
A Literary GIS,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
36
(2011): 89-108 explore eighteenth-century literature associated with the
English Lake District, while E. Barker, S. Bouzarovski, C. Pelling, and
L. Isaksen, “Mapping an Ancient Historian in a Digital Age: The Her-
odotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive (HESTIA),”
Leeds Interna-
tional Classical Studies
9 (2010): 1-36 explore the writing of a historian
in the ancient world.
