Historical geography II: Digital imaginations

In my second report discussing the state of historical geography, I review some of the ways historical geographers have made use of digital technologies and digital media. I also highlight how digital data, research, and presentation are affecting related humanities disciplines and inspiring their practitioners to engage more fully with geographic concepts of space, place, and cartography. I argue that information technologies and digital media can deepen the place of historical geography in the academy and in the public’s eye.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Praxes of “The Human” and “The Digital”: Spatial Humanities and the Digitization of Place

The spatial humanities have evolved much in the last ten years or so, and much of this evolution has been driven by project and problem-based GIS applications. It is argued here that the field lacks a theoretical framework analogous to Critical GIS in human geography. I argue that, just as Critical GIS drew on the intellectual hinterlands of human and hybrid geography, so must the spatial humanities draw on the intellectual hinterlands of how humanities discourse have always formed and transmitted concepts of place. Rhetoric, and especially the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis are given as an example of this; a project co-led by the author, the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus, is given as an example of how the digitzation of (humanistic) place has been operationalized

Geographic Visualization in Archaeology

Archaeologists are often considered frontrunners in employing spatial approaches within the social sciences and humanities, including geospatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) that are now routinely used in archaeology. Since the late 1980s, GIS has mainly been used to support data collection and management as well as spatial analysis and modeling. While fruitful, these efforts have arguably neglected the potential contribution of advanced visualization methods to the generation of broader archaeological knowledge. This paper reviews the use of GIS in archaeology from a geographic visualization (geovisual) perspective and examines how these methods can broaden the scope of archaeological research in an era of more user-friendly cyber-infrastructures. Like most computational databases, GIS do not easily support temporal data. This limitation is particularly problematic in archaeology because processes and events are best understood in space and time. To deal with such shortcomings in existing tools, archaeologists often end up having to reduce the diversity and complexity of archaeological phenomena. Recent developments in geographic visualization begin to address some of these issues, and are pertinent in the globalized world as archaeologists amass vast new bodies of geo-referenced information and work towards integrating them with traditional archaeological data. Greater effort in developing geovisualization and geovisual analytics appropriate for archaeological data can create opportunities to visualize, navigate and assess different sources of information within the larger archaeological community, thus enhancing possibilities for collaborative research and new forms of critical inquiry

High COVID-19 Attack Rate Among Attendees at Events at a Church — Arkansas, March 2020

This report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention details a rural Arkansas church and the spread of COVID-19 amongst the members of this church, including the death rate among members. The report does not name the church or the names of its members but does provide details for how the virus spread among the community. Implications for faith-based communities in Arkansas is discussed in the CDC report

Towards an Extensible Framework for Understanding Spatial Narratives

Spatial narratives help us to organize experiences and give them meaning. Previous approaches to understanding geographies in textual sources focus on geoparsing to automatically identify place names and allocate them to coordinates. Those are highly quantitative, and are limited to named places with coordinates, and have little concept of time. Narratives of journeys indicate that human experiences of geography are often subjective and more suited to qualitative representation. Geography is not limited to named places but incorporates the vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, e.g "the camp", or "the hills in the distance", and relative locations such as "near to", "on the left", "north of" or "a few hours' journey from". Places are organized worlds of meaning, characterized by experience, emotion, and memory as well as by geography. In this paper, we discuss our approach to gaining more insight from textual data beyond the toponyms and introduce an extensible framework for extracting, analyzing, and visualizing spatial elements that define the 'locale' as well as the 'sense of place' referenced in text using two test corpora --the Corpus of the Lake District Writing and Holocaust Survivors' Testimonies