Newswise — In “Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives,” West Virginia University geography professor and editor Trevor Harris explains how the humanities are gaining even more context with the use of geographic information.
Deep maps are finely detailed, multimedia depictions of a place and the people, buildings, objects, flora, and fauna that exist within it and which are inseparable from the activities of everyday life. These depictions may encompass the beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears of residents and help show what ties one place to another.
The shift to “spatial” mapping has been happening for the last 20 years, Harris said.
Traditional geographic information systems cannot represent uncertainty, ambiguity, emotion, metaphor, or other dynamic attributes of interest to humanists who seek to combine space, time and place.
“A lot of the humanities has been based on an isotropic blank space – a map that just has place names on it,” Harris said. “There’s no geography, no relief, no information about the economy, vegetation, the people. It’s almost like events take place in this spatial vacuum.”
The book features a collection of essays from authors in a wide array of disciplines, including history, religious studies, geography and geographic information science, and computer science. Each applies the concepts of space, time and place to problems central to an understanding of society and culture.
This is the second publication from Harris with his co-editors David Bodenhammer and John Corrigan. Bodenhammer is a professor of history at Indiana University. Corrigan is a professor of religion and history at Florida State University. Their previous release, “The Spatial Humanities,” examined how geographic systems could influence the study of the humanities.
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