The geospatial humanities: past, present and future

1. Introduction to the IJGIS special issue on spatial computing for the digital humanities

Scholars in the humanities have a long tradition in the investigation of spatial theory and methods, as well as on the analysis of space and place within its multiple disciplines. Although technologies such as Geographic Information Systems have been used in Humanities fields such as Archaeology for over four decades, it has been only in recent years that the development of new technologies and methods have led to the emergence of the field that is now more commonly known as the Spatial Humanities, often also referred to as GeoHumanities. Although usually thought as interchangeable, there is an important epistemological difference between the previous two terms, which we will reflect upon briefly in this editorial note. Nevertheless, it is of great interest to notice that the integration of standard spatial analysis methodologies (e.g., GIS based least-cost path analysis, computation of viewsheds and zones of influence, dasymetric mapping, terrain classification according to land coverage or land use, different types of thematic cartography techniques, etc.) with the innovative approaches currently being actively researched within Geographical Information Science (e.g., geographical text analysis or spatial simulation, taking advantage of machine learning, semantic technologies, etc.), are bringing new forms of investigation to fields in the Humanities such as History, Literature, Dialectology, Theology and Religious Studies, among others. Testimony of this new wave of interdisciplinary research are the increasing publications in the form of articles and books in the diverse subjects that can be encapsulated within the label of GeoHumanities, but also dedicated meetings and sessions in some of the most relevant conferences, both in the GISciences (e.g. the ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, from which this special issue emerges) and the Humanities (e.g. the ADHO Digital Humanities Conference, or the Spatial Humanities conference at Lancaster University, among many other events organised to discuss the study of space and time).

This special issue looks to provide IJGIS readers a broad sample and overview of the current state-of-the-art in this field, aiming to spark new views regarding the use of spatial technologies in fields where they have not been common in the past. In doing so, it is our hope that geographical information scientists and other scholars can explore some of the varied and emerging topics in this field, opening new possible venues of collaboration with the Humanities.

2. Experimentation, turns, and the humanities

The Humanities have been, until now, rarely conceived as experimental. In the long time in which Humanities disciplines have established their canons, possibly only Archaeology has been able (or allowed more freely, due to a series of reasons) to explore its subjects through a closer approach to that of the sciences. Perhaps due to its interdisciplinary nature and its central focus of study on materiality, Archaeology has been, from all the Humanities fields, the one that has been an early adopter (and adapter) of technologies such as GIS, having explored overarching experimental approaches aiming to solve some of the questions that seem to be common across cultures and periods. Space and place have been invariably central to this field, perhaps because its aim is usually to investigate who, when, and what, almost always starting from where. The daily work of the archaeologist is spatial in nature. From investigating the transformation of landscapes, to understanding the distribution of pottery in an excavation trench, or the arrangement of bones in a grave, the processes of interpretation of an archaeologist usually passes through the spatial sift.

Conceptions of space in Archaeology have, however, changed over time. Across its evolution, the field has seen a profound transformation on how space is understood and conceived. The multiple theoretical perspectives developed in the discipline have constantly rethought ideas of space, from conceptions of it in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries developing theories regarding standing stones and monuments (e.g., Stukeley theories of Avebury and Stonehenge), and geographic determinism and diffusionism, conceiving space as the blank canvas or theatre for cultural and social development in the early 20th century, to phenomenology and cognitive archaeology, where space gives way to place in a fluid and constantly evolving experience where all is connected.

Although perhaps more obvious in Archaeology, other fields of the Humanities such as History and Literature have been also closely concerned with ideas of space and place. As with Archaeology, during the 19th century, ideas of landscape and its role in the construction of nation would influence theoretical approaches in History towards the early 20th century, that eventually would see the formation of currents such as Urban History, and a profound preoccupation for the landscape. In more recent times, while practitioners of the discipline have traditionally studied time and place as parallel concepts, Spatial History has emerged as a sub-field looking to merge both (Campbell 2016). In the case of Literature, explorations of space were initiated in the descriptive, interpretative and fictional worlds of works in the 19th century, where the dynamics in urban spaces and travel accounts opened ways to reflect and understand place, at least from particular perspectives (Kalifa 2004, Grant 2010). Moreover, in the past century, literary geography and literary cartography have also emerged as strong interdisciplinary fields (Cooper et al. 2016).

While in the case of Archaeology the focus of spatial reflexion has been explicitly expressed within most of its theoretical currents, in the case of History and Literature this has been framed as Spatial Turns. A revision of the approaches to space and place within these three fields reveals that these turns are useful to understand the development of theoretical thinking, but often they seem to give the impression to the newcomer that the profound study of spatiality in the Humanities has just begun. If these fields have always studied space and place, one might wonder why is it that GeoHumanities and the Spatial Humanities are emerging now as new fields?

In the past 20 years, these three disciplines have been influenced profoundly, at one time or another, by theoretical currents developed after the 1970s in Human Geography and Philosophy, such as the ones initiated, among many others, by the publication of The production of Space by Henri Lefebvre, and Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan, and current Anthropological research such as that of Ingold (2009). These currents have emphasised that (a) space changes over time; (b) place is not dependent on space; (c) place is created through fluid social and experiential pathways that coincide, as Ingold (2009) interprets it, as knots and threads that form lines of wayfaring; and (d) that spaces might go beyond geographies, this is to say, that place can be both real and imagined (Soja and Chouinard 1999). The current Spatial Turn therefore focuses on the idea that social change cannot be explained without considering and re-conceptualising categories related to the spatial component of social life (Löw 2013). It is now acknowledged that reaching such understanding might not only be easier, but also richer through a deep interdisciplinary approach, which in the past few years has brought together not only these disciplines (i.e., History, Archaeology and Literature), but also included scientific areas which previously have rarely worked with most fields in the Humanities, such as Computer and Information Sciences.

This Spatial Turn has also sparked a new wave of scholarship under the umbrella of Digital Humanities (DH), exploring spatial methods and technologies in collaboration with fields such as the Geographic Information Sciences. This is what is usually called, in the context of DH, the GeoHumanities. This new exploration, however, has also given way, for the first time, to more experimental approaches in the Humanities, where questions are being explored by considering information and perspectives that are usually not from individual fields. This is the case, for instance, of research being carried out that includes visualisation methods for textual corpora and cultural heritage (see for instance the ongoing work presented at the visualisation workshops for DH at IEEE VIS), gaming technologies (Hergenrader 2016, Flood and Cain 2018), but also linguistic approaches and methods such as Geographical Text Analysis (Leidner 2007, Santos et al. 2015, Wing 2015, Murrieta-Flores et al. 2015, Gregory et al. 2015) – see also the articles by Cheskonova et al., McDonough et al., and Moncla et al., in this issue – which make use not only of GIS, but also of theories and methods from Corpus Linguistics and Natural Language Processing to analyse and study geographies mentioned in texts.

While GeoHumanities has emerged as an interdisciplinary field focusing on the geographic components of space and place, there is another related label that has developed in parallel and is often seen as interchangeable, but that considers the relevant concern that not all spaces and places are geographical, this is to say, the Spatial Humanities (Bodenhamer et al. 2010, 2013). In doing this distinction, humanists aim to highlight not only that often History, Archaeology and Literature deal with symbolic, vague and imaginary space, but also with conceptions that can be different to those of the West or Modernity, responding to the long-held debate initiated in the 1990’s with Critical GIS and the transformation on the definitions of place, derived from Geography, Anthropology and Philosophy (Hayden 1994, Harvey 2006, Seamon and Sowers 2008, Ingold 2009, Lefebvre 2011). This is highly relevant in the Humanities, given that historical and literary texts will often deal with geographic, symbolic, and/or imaginary places. Examples of this are literary genres such as Medieval Romance, where Camelot and London might be equally important in the construction of a narrative (Murrieta-flores and Howell 2017). In the same sense, bringing subaltern understandings and conceptions of place, such as the Mesoamerican or the aboriginal Australian that are outside the standard cartographic or modern paradigms, is encouraging humanities scholars to think, create, and adopt alternative methods and tools to GIS (which has been predominant in the field), exploring now approaches that although can be seen as equally problematic, are being actively used as tools for critical reflexion, and promoting spatial explorations to be more playful. This is the case, for instance, of Deep Mapping, Network Analysis (see the article by Guidal and Gavin in this issue), Gaming, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Semantic Web approaches, among others. As the papers in this volume testify, the Geographic Information Sciences will keep playing a fundamental role in the development of these discussions, and this is a fertile and exciting arena where there is still much to be learnt from the experiences emerging from all the fields that are involved.

3. Summary of the articles in the IJGIS special issue on spatial computing for the digital humanities

This IJGIS special issue collects five different articles reporting on advances in the field of GeoHumanities, exploring and demonstrating the contributions that modern spatial analysis and other technologies can enable for the study of space and place.

Chesnokova et al. described geographic text analysis methods for the study of landscape changes with basis on written accounts, exploring what written materials might reveal about the role of sound and soundscapes in connection to natural landscapes. Specifically, the authors proposed to analyze mentions to silence and tranquillity in historical and contemporary corpora (i.e., the historical Corpus of Lake District Writing, and contemporary data from the Geograph Project), in order to explore how landscapes were/are perceived in the Lake District National Park, in England. Using sentiment analysis methods, the authors show that mentions to silence and tranquil sounds are as a whole more positively associated than random text from the corpora, with this difference being especially marked in contemporary descriptions. Mapping places referenced in the corpora confirmed the influence of renowned authors (e.g., Wordsworth’s writings) on descriptions of silence, and also revealed the co-location of pockets of tranquillity near to transport arteries in contemporary descriptions.

Specifically focusing on materials from the Early Modern period (1400–1800), McDonough et al. discussed limitations on existing technology for geographical text analysis (i.e., existing methods for place name identification and resolution, leveraging gazetteers and natural language processing methods). Using French textual documents from the canonical eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, the authors evaluated rule-based place reference recognition and disambiguation methods (i.e., the Edinburgh Geoparser and the Perdido system) to pinpoint cases requiring additional work. Among the encountered limitations, the authors emphasize the dependency on anachronistic gazetteers, and problems in the identification of complex or vague spatial information. The authors also experimented with a new process of capturing place names alongside useful contextual information, arguing that annotating nested and extended place information is one way to improve early modern geographical text analysis.

Moncla et al. described a novel methodology for mapping the spatial fingerprints of French novels and corresponding authors, based on named urban roads (i.e., odonyms) extracted from the text of the novels, also arguing how one such platform can be used in areas such as cultural tourism, urban studies, or literary analysis. Specifically, the article describes two different methodologies for automatically extracting named urban roads from textual documents, and for mapping the results obtained from a sample of 31 novels, in which the action occurs wholly or partly in Paris and that were published between 1800 and 1914. Additionally, the authors discuss how the information in the texts (e.g., structures combining verbs, geo-spatial relations, named entities, adjectives and adverbs) can be used to automatically characterize the semantic content associated with the named urban roads.

Gidal and Gavin proposed to combine GIS tools, computational semantics, and network analysis methods, to explore historical connections between language and infrastructure, specifically focusing on nineteenth century Scotland. The authors built a network model from the collection of postal directories published online by the National Library of Scotland (i.e., names and addresses of local businesspeople, plus information on mail, carrier, rail and shipping schedules), and combined this information with the parish reports collected into the Statistical Accounts of Scotland in the 1790s and 1830-40s (i.e., regional representations of national transport and communication, alongside population records, administrative and ecclesiastical information, information on natural resources and manufacturing, etc.). Combining these datasets allowed the authors to compare changing patterns in geographic description with transformations in the infrastructural networks that supported Scotlands industrial development.

Finally, Yuan et al. proposed a novel Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) approach that considers an adaptive bandwidth threshold, leveraging a quad-tree data structure for spatial data segmentation, as a way of speeding-up the computation of the different location-specific bandwidths. The authors quantitatively evaluated the performance of the proposed method in terms of correctness and computation efficiency, at the same time also discussing possible applications for the produced heat-map visualizations for spatial point patterns.

4. Conclusions

The GeoHumanities are in constant evolution. While the different articles in this IJGIS special issue focus and demonstrate the contributions that modern spatial analysis methods, and technologies such as geographical text analysis, can enable for the study of space and place, there is much to be explored. The field is still learning how mixed theoretical methods, and also interdisciplinary approaches, can inform and transform spatial studies in the Humanities and related fields, in order to reach a more holistic approach not only to investigate geographic, vague, and imaginary spaces and places, but also the complexities of time. We believe that experimentation, and also collaboration between multiple disciplines, are at the heart of this exciting goal. It is our hope that through the contributions in this IJGIS special issue, scholars from the Geographic Information Sciences are not only made aware of the many conversations happening in the Humanities, but become also excited about the possibilities of working with these fields.