Live Blogging DH09 — Session Eight (or Seven)
Posted by John Theibault on June 24th, 2009
This afternoon’s panel at DH09 is from members of University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab. Presenters are Bethany Nowviskie, Joseph Gilbert, Christopher Gist, Kelly Johnston, and Adam Soroka. UVa Scholar’s Lab is involved in several initiatives connected to GIS. Indeed, the Scholar’s Lab will be an information clearing-house for GIS for humanists.
Kelly Johnston starts with a reminder of why GIS matters to humanities. Urges humanities folks to “think like a geographer.” You don’t have to have precise coordinates to do GIS. ESRI portal tool kit didn’t work so well on their system. So turned instead to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Geospatial Data Portal Beta is at Scholar’s Lab.
Adam Soroka talks about the tools available at the lab to develop new GIS. It is built as a “Service Oriented Architecture”. GeoServer translates raster data and GIS to create new maps.
Chris Gist discusses one application of GIS, the Southern History Database. Used to have to do everything by hand; now it can be done using OSGeo suite. Users can get the maps directly in the browser instead of needing proprietary software.
Bethany Nowviskie and Joe Gilbert talk about how non-technical specialists make use of these particular tools. Bring in scanned historical maps to go with vector data. Nowviskie interprets Frances Henshaw’s drawings of maps in her pennmanship book which are transformed into art objects. She calls this an example of “graphesis.” Gilbert follows with a discussion of Google Map Markers as an icon of GIS. Invokes Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope” as a model for marking events on maps. What do we need to move forward from cluttered presentation of Google Earth?
It may also be possible to develop applications for imaginary spaces like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County using GIS.
It will be important to see what comes out of the UVa Scholar’s Lab in the next few years.
Note: This is the second set of presentations based on the Prezi presentation software. Prezi zooms in and out a lot and be kind of disorienting.