Educational

Geography 4997: Digital Humanities Geographic Information Systems

One of the results of this project has been a new course, Geography 4997: Digital Humanities GIS. The first iteration ran in Fall 2013 and enrolled 13 students drawn from Historical and Cultural Geography, Anthropology, English Literature, French, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and other humanities disciplines. Most had no prior experience working with GIS. It combined hands-on exercises with discussion of readings about the spatial digital humanities and a GIS project of each student's own choosing. The required text was The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, with supplementary readings from the open-access edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities. More info is available here.

After completing a series of exercises introducing GIS and Web mapping basics using ArcMap 10.2, ArcGIS Online, Google Maps, and Google Earth, each of the students completed a project of their own choosing. They conceptualized the project, located data, constructed a database, created a GIS, and used that to publish a Web map in ArcGIS Online, Google Earth, or Google Maps.

Following are links to those projects, mainly webpages or blogs in which the students have embedded their Web maps. They are a diverse and impressive group of projects and demonstrate what students can create if freed from the drudgery of prepackaged GIS exercises replete with sanitized data sets and step-by-step instructions. Instead of learning by rote, they leveraged their inherent creativity to acquire, prepare, map, and analyze information relevant to spatial patterns and processes in their own fields, publish those projects as Web maps and thereby acquire new skills and ways of thinking about their major that enhances its relevance to life and work in an increasingly digital, online world.

After such a remarkably successful first iteration, the conclusion has to be that there is great potential to expand the course in future, perhaps with an online component and additional courses in other departments that would form the basis for an interdisciplinary minor or certification in digital humanities. Some experts believe that humanities majors increasingly will require such coursework as much of our social interaction and economic transaction moves onto the Web.

Please contact me if interested in pursuing something in this area.

This Website and all constituent materials are © 2013 Andrew Sluyter but open source and licensed through the Creative Commons as attribution-noncommercial 3.0, which allows others to use the contents, data, and programming to produce non-commercial derivative products.