Summary Responses to SCI 7 Preliminary Questionnaire

(Verbatim participant responses to our questions, posed to SCI 7 participants in the weeks leading up to the Institute, are reproduced in boldface type.)

We are designing the Scholarly Communication Institute to address important goals for the development of spatial resources and scholarship, as well as a set of actions that will advance these goals, spatially-enabled humanities in general, and your work in particular. We use the term “spatial” broadly to include geospatial and GIS tools and applications, historical cartography and mapping, spatial visualizations and virtual environments, and the underlying spatial literacy that all these foster and demand. To identify salient topics for our session, we wish to learn both your near-term needs and your long-term ambitions for spatially-enabled humanities scholarship.

What significant intellectual agendas do you see emerging in your field (and beyond) as a result of the integration of spatial technologies, resources, and GIS media in research, practice, and teaching?

Key trends:

1. Spatial turn in numerous disciplines
2. Widespread adoption of vernacular spatial applications
3. Increased collaboration across disciplines as well as with non-academic experts and the public
4. Reinvigoration of pedagogy through use of spatial technologies
5. Research infrastructure for resources and publication is inadequate for the new scholarship

Spatial turn
People note a spatial turn across the spectrum of humanities, with each discipline seeing opportunities to use spatial technologies both to deepen their reach into their field, and to broaden their approach to embrace other disciplinary modes. The ability to represent spatial data on a global scale, as well as on the very large scale of small spaces has led to greater demand and respect for “facts on the ground.” This might augur an impending “empirical turn,” in which case spatial representations may well serve as the critical meeting ground for science, social science, and humanities. Emerging areas of inquiry include the natural and built environments, their histories, and so-called large-scale phenomena such as migration patterns, the movement of people, goods, and ideas across space and time.

The crucial emerging agenda for the humanities in general is to domesticate spatial technologies developed for the sciences to our specific ways of knowing. “In contrast to the natural sciences and positivist social sciences, the humanities and humanistic social sciences are characterized by (1) multiple, often competing, interpretive paradigms; (2) a high level of ambiguity in the delineation of what is to be recorded and how; (3) an emphasis on the relative versus absolute placement of things and people in space and time; and (4) an explicit concern with subjective meaning and hence the interpretive autonomy of individual scholars whose particular taxonomies and diverse ways of organizing things in time and space should not be suppressed in favor of a standardized mode of data representation that implies a single anonymous authority. The intellectual challenge for us is to develop a basic shared ontology and related database structures that conform to the distinctive practices of humanistic research rather than to rely on ontologies and database structures developed in a different intellectual and institutional milieu (e.g., in the realm of commerce or of natural science).”

For geographers, who come in both positivist and humanist flavors, the spatial turn in humanities coincides with their own re-examination of cartographic conventions, looking at maps as more than “mirrors or representations of ‘reality’.” They are particularly interested in developing representations of uncertainty and ambiguity, the production of “new subjectivities and identities,” and “interactive geovisualization” platforms.

Adoption of vernacular technologies
The widespread adoption of consumer applications and the proliferation of “geo APIs” seems to be the backbone of the spatial turn in the humanities. Now people take spatially enabled mobile devices with them wherever they go. They see platforms such as Google Earth as armature for presenting all manner of data. Such platforms allow people who are not fluent in the quantitative approaches of GIS to work and play in space. And they want more. Moreover, spatial technologies are understood as an integral feature of visualization, evidenced by respondents’ frequent use of the term visualization to mean seeing things in their spatial dimensions.

For geographers, these applications have led to an upsurge in “volunteered geographic information,” and this in turn challenges the quantitative approaches to become more amenable to natural language. “Terms like ‘Mapping 2.0’ or ‘neogeography’ hint at the ways in which these new practices unbound geographers’ claims over cartography, GIS, and so on.”

For all, these applications have very welcome implications for public humanities. They also raise deeper “questions of spatial data handling or dealing with natural language or textual geographic identifiers (as opposed to say, latitude/longitude coordinates), and … questions of whether these new practices represent a fundamental shift in societal paradigms for the creation, ownership, and uses of geographic information.”

Modes of working
Spatial technologies “virtually force our projects to be collaborative,” given the range of expertise and volume of brute-force labor (such a data entry and georectification) needed to do projects “at scale.” Scholarship can move beyond language and texts to visualizations; this is profoundly liberating to scholars of poorly documented people and phenomena, the built environment, and ancient landscapes, who have suffered from the inability to represent visual evidence. That said, an enormous number of primary resources demanded by humanists—texts, images, and most importantly maps—are not yet scanned or, if scanned, are not machine-readable, georectified, or otherwise rendered amenable to spatial manipulation and analysis. This means the startup time for large-scale projects is discouragingly slow. In fact, the scale of resources need to develop these projects is so great that it is forcing younger scholars to turn away from the time-intensive sophisticated applications and go for consumer or open-source applications.

Across the board, spatial technologies are having a big impact in the classroom. “In practice, spatial technologies have been a wonderful teaching tool. Probably the best teaching that I and my colleagues do takes place in our spatial history lab.” This sentiment is widely shared among respondents. This raises in turn very big questions about what it means to teach through spatial representations, and how students learn. Above all, what is critical spatial thinking and how do we teach it?

Research infrastructure
The research infrastructure to support the spatial turn in the humanities is in its very earliest stages. From the library perspective, the sheer volume of technology and information resources needed to run a sophisticated spatial library operation is complicated by two things: the pace of technology change, which is simply too rapid for people to keep up with; and the absence of agreed-upon models for managing and preserving (digital) geospatial resources.

Publishing geospatial scholarship is at best a very sad compromise between stripped-down text-only arguments in traditional journals and pointers to Web sites that represent spatial data, often dynamically, on 2-D and 3-D geospatial platforms. This will not do, and is felt keenly as a brake on new scholarship.

What are the geospatial, cartographic, and mapping resources, tools and applications, and venues for disseminating your scholarship that are currently most important to you?

Key resources:

1. “Traditional” sophisticated GIS programs such ArcGIS
2. Vernacular and consumer technologies such as Google Earth and open source applications, blogs
3. Other people

Preferred technologies
There is a significant difference between those who work fluently with sophisticated GIS applications, notably ESRI’s ArcGIS, and those who do not. It is clear than if the spatial turn were entirely dependent upon everyone mastering these sophisticated licensed resources, it would not penetrate very deeply into the humanities. Most people use and want more of the readily accessible, relatively simple, and often “free” applications such as Google and Microsoft’s maps and globes and an array of “neo-geo” applications. And as geographers, archaeologists, and historians see more students in their classes, peers in other disciplines, and most especially, the general public embracing lightweight, mobile, spatial technologies, they embrace them as tools for collaboration, participatory research, and teaching. The inadequacies of current models of GIS to handle issues of multiple agencies, fluid or indeterminate boundaries, qualititativeand sensory data, and even changing terminologies for spaces is frequently remarked among geographers and archaeologists.

Those looking at local phenomena, such the built environment, archeological sites, architecture, and ecosystems, really want 3-D visualization to put their data into for hypothesizing and testing.

Knowledgeable people
Given the wealth of resources becoming available and the difficulty keeping up with him, knowledgeable people continue to be “the best single resource” for making progress. The relentless introduction of new technologies and the accelerating pace of change have made traditional sources of keeping abreast of the field, from reading trusted publications to consulting librarians, extremely problematic. For those who are relatively new to using spatial technologies in trying to get oriented, this is a particular problem. Even those who have been in the field for decades rely almost exclusively on informal modes of acquiring knowledge, both on the web and in person. “I pay attention to the places where these new ideas intersect and are described: the internet and the blogs maintained by those active in the field; conferences where academics share their ideas and progress.” Where 2.0 has become the place people go to find out about what is happening next.

Looking ahead five years, which spatial resources, tools and applications, environments for teaching and research, or research and development gains would you most like to have? What do you think it would take to realize these— in particular, what organizational models are best for developing and disseminating these advances?

What we need and how to make it happen:

1. More time
2. Better suite of tools
3. Online peer-reviewed journal for spatial scholarship
4. Major advances in resources management and archiving

The temporal dimension
There was a near universal lament that pace of change is so fast that it is nearly impossible to keep up with new developments, let alone to reflect on what is significant and what it not; even the prospects of developing long-term projects, as desirable and even necessary as they are, have been obviated by the demands on people’s time. “Most of all, I find the rapid pace of change and innovation in geospatial technologies to be the biggest challenge I face in research and in teaching. I mean far more than just new versions of softwares—I mean completely new paradigms for how we handle geospatial information, both digitally in a computing environment and societally. There are diminishing institutional resources available for academics who need to continually transform the content and structure of their curriculum to deal with these sorts of shifts. The main resource that is needed is time—time to teach yourself new practices, time to learn together with others or come together to develop new content and approaches. For example, I think the students currently in my GIS classes need to be better prepared for the collision of these new spatial media with conventional GIS, but I feel quite limited in being able to develop opportunities for this preparation. Resources for faculty workshops, new software acquisition, collaborations for sharing teaching modules and ideas would all be welcome.”

Respondents are not just concerned about the number of specific technologies and applications that are available for them to use, if they can find out about them. More importantly, people understand that the very paradigms for handling geospatial information are changing, and this is seen both as an opportunity and a source of some anxiety.

One remedy is to provide more opportunities for discussion and knowledge transfer, such as workshops that bring together the spatially sophisticated scholars with those seeking to learn more about spatial scholarship, as well as “increased web-based opportunities for collaboration and data sharing.”

Tools, tools, tools
People want a bigger, better suite of tools, better meaning open source or otherwise readily accessible, lighter weight, and faster, “a suite of tools that facilitate the exposure of geospatial and temporal relations beween different persons, events, documents, and places, both real and “conceptual”.” “Bottom line, an open and accessible context for research, teaching and scholarship—no more locked up scholarship, closed off educational resources, and expensive, restricted software tools.”

The tools also have to address the scaling and integration issues, which means that “the most critical elements have to do with standards, interoperability, and combination of technologies (rather than single tools and single orgs).”

Managing data and building communities
Rather than trying to build a big system which can address all of these issues, it is better to focus on networks that can connect local projects and build shared resources. For example, how will the new online architectural history resource, SAHARA, work with or be integrated into geospatial resources? Developing consortia of projects of common interests—spatial history projects, or archaeological time periods or sites—would be one way to gain traction.

More than that, there need to be more resources online, especially historical maps, more APIs for scholars, major data sets like the U.S. Census readily accessible. And with that, there need to be “more sophisticated search engines for geospatial and tabular data” to enable scholarship and, just as importantly, to avoid redundant efforts on the part of libraries, archives, and technologists.

A third critical need repeated frequently is for a peer-reviewed online journal in spatial humanities. Yes, this would acquire funding, dedicated people to edit and manage, and a friendly university to provide infrastructure and ensure stewardship over time. It was notable was that none of the respondents suggested such a journal be situated within a specific discipline. It must be open to all forms of spatial humanities inquiry. Comments about a journal often stood in for a larger discussion of building a community of scholars who work in an open, dynamic, self-critical mode in a venue that allows for experimentation and mutual exploration of problems across disciplines.

What hopes and expectations do you have for this institute?

Desired outcomes

1. To gain knowledge through sharing of perspectives
2. Meet possible collaborators
3. Gain a better understanding of the potential for spatial technologies to produce research breakthroughs

New perspectives
Geographers are interested in what people outside their discipline or doing with spatial technologies, how they conceive of spatial thinking, and what effects this broad embrace of spatial awareness on the part of humanities and in the broader public means for their discipline, their research, and the fate of the spatial awareness to which they have dedicated their professional lives. For those exploring spatial technologies within humanistic disciplines, there is curiosity about what other people are doing, what they can learn from other people’s experiments, and where intellectual agendas might meet.

New partners
People already engaged in using spatial technologies are eager to find collaborators. And collaboration is discussed on many terms. They were sharing of technology and resources. There is the exciting possibility of developing common research agendas with people with whom they would not normally have the opportunity to work. And there is a critical need to articulate what a common skill set for spatial humanities would be and to find mechanisms for providing them for their students, their graduate students, and of course, for themselves and their peers.

New paradigms
Finally, there seems to be general buzz about spatial technologies and a spatial turn in the humanities, but many people are unclear about what that means. What, precisely, would that look like? What would change? “How did these technologies produce research breakthroughs? Give me a case study, how someone learns things, sees new relationships, makes new connections, raises new questions; are there exemplars [or] projects that can demonstrate value to the humanities community?”