Charles Travis

Transcending the cube: translating GIScience time and space perspectives in a humanities GIS

This paper discusses a Humanities Geographical Information Systems timespace modeling project, which does not reject the ‘space-time’ cube model but rather incorporates, translates and metonymically focuses GIScience methodologies through the epistemological prisms of the arts and humanities. The arts and humanities may offer insights which GIScience can consider in order to conceptualise and model timespaces. Employing the Euclidian framing of conventional GIS approaches, it attempts to artistically, metaphorically and metonymically engage the ‘space-time’ cube concept as a means to suggest a non-linear and fragmented perspective of space and time. The case study presented in this paper triangulates in GIS ‘soft’ data from a modernist novel depicting postmodern perspectives, empirical data sourced from fieldwork guided by the urban mapping strategies of Guy Debord and the Situationists Internationale and Giambattista Vico’s cyclical view of history with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s literary motif of the chronotope as techniques to model contiguous perspectives of linear and cyclical timespace. The paper hopes to encourage ways to reflect upon a rapprochement between humanistic and scientific approaches to modelling space and time with GIS.

Abstract Machine – Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for literary and cultural studies: ‘Mapping Kavanagh’

Drawing upon previous theoretical and practical work in historical and qualitative applications of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), this paper, in Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris terminology, conceptualizes GIS as ‘an abstract machine’ which plays a ‘piloting role’ which does not ‘function to represent’ something real, but rather ‘constructs a real which is yet to come.’ To illustrate this digital humanities mapping methodology, the essay examines Irish writer Patrick Kavanaghs novel The Green Fool (1938) and epic poem The Great Hunger (1946) and their respective contrasting topophilic and topophobic renderings of landscape, identity and sense of place under the lens M.M. Bakhtins ‘Historical Poetics’ (chronotope) to illuminate GISs ability to engage in spatio-discursive visualization and analysis. The conceptualizations and practices discussed in this paper reconsider GIS software/hardware/techniques as a means to engage subjects of concern to literary and cultural studies commensurate with ...

Visual Geo-Literary and Historical Analysis, Tweetflickrtubing, and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)

Situated at the intersection of the arts and sciences, Humanities GIS (HumGIS) are contributing to new knowledge systems emerging in the digital, spatial, and geo-humanities. This article discusses the conceptualization and operationalization of two HumGIS models engaging the cartographical and discursive tools employed by James Joyce to compose Ulysses ([1922] 1992). The first model is used to perform a visual geo-literary historical analysis by transposing Homeric and Dantean topologies on a spatialized narrative of Joyces work. The second model integrates Ulysses within a social media map to interpret Bloomsday 2014 digital ecosystem spatial performances in Dublin and globally. This article suggests that HumGIS models reflecting human contingency, idiosyncrasy, and affect, drawing on literary, historical, and social media tools, sources, and perceptions, might offer GIScience, neogeography, and big data studies alternative spatial framings and modeling scenarios.

The Digital Arts and Humanities

The case studies in this book illuminate how arts and humanities tropes can aid in contextualizing Digital Arts and Humanities, Neogeographic and Social Media activity and data through the creation interpretive schemas to study interactions between visualizations, language, human behaviour, time and place.

Writing Visual Histories: An Interview with David J. Staley

The author has held an interview with David Staley, a well-known pioneer in computer visualizations in history.

Bauhaus dream-house, modernity and globalization

emergence of women into public space mediated by the city’s western location? Did the high proportion of immigrants in the city affect the development of neighbourhood shopping areas (a topic addressed with skill in Chapter 2), or was it similar to the situation in New York or Chicago? Such comparison would have strengthened her analysis and added nuance to her examination of San Francisco. One of the book’s strengths lies in its attention to class. Sewell skilfully demonstrates the way that income, as much as class, affected a woman’s ability to navigate the city. Using the diaries of Mary Eugenia Pierce and Annie Fader Haskell allows her to make direct comparisons between lower-middle and upper-middle class women’s use of the city and to ground her analysis in solid evidence. Furthermore, her discussions of the different shopping and leisure habits of working-class versus middle-class women demonstrate that space was both gendered and classed. But what of race? Although Sewell makes mention of the different immigrant neighbourhoods in the city, she does not delve into the racial nature of space in the city. Given the publication of innovative recent works on the city’s Chinatown by Nayan Shah and Anthony Lee, among others, this seems to be an odd omission. Much of Sewell’s discussion of space is visual and the book includes a very large number of illustrations, many of which support her arguments effectively. Unfortunately, the quality of some of the reproductions is poor enough as to be distracting to the reader, calling into question the decision to include them in a published work. Fewer images of higher quality would have been a more effective illustrative choice. Nonetheless, this book makes a compelling argument for the necessity of considering the built environment into our understandings of gender, city development, and political movements, and should be read by all who are interested in these topics as well as in the history of San Francisco.

Digital Practices of the Moral Imagination, Socially Engaged Theatre and the Creative Transformation of Conflict in Northern Ireland

This chapter will stress the need to document, analyse and critically reflect on ways in which digital practices of the moral imagination can “aid us in understanding different perspectives of the human condition” in conflict affected societies (Terras 2011, para. 18). This is achieved through a discussion of two theatre-centric initiatives in Northern Ireland: the Verbal Art’s Centres (VAC) Crows on the Wire and Kabosh Theatre Company’s Streets of Belfast projects. This chapter opens with a synopsis of conflict theorist J.P. Lederach’s notion of moral imagination and its connection to a broader vision of digital humanities. The second section focuses on the Crows on the Wire project and in particular the creation of VAC’s first digital graphic novel inspired by the play’s script. This is followed by an analysis of Kabosh’s groundbreaking Streets of Belfast App in the often overlooked area of cultural tourism in the peacebuilding field. The analysis is based on doctoral research conducted by Ms. Foy as part of the digital arts and humanities PhD programme at Trinity College Dublin and with funding from the Republic of Ireland government.

The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do We Need It? the NorFish Project and SmartCity Lifeworlds

In the twenty-first century, we are challenged with a transformation in human collective intelligence. The key features of this transformation involve the “digital” replacing the “analogue”; design thinking and post-secularism supplanting tradition, and human perception and agency emerging as the main drivers of planetary change. The Digital Anthropocene is defined by the twenty-first century confluence of the digital revolution, global warming and social, economic, and political conflict. The digital environmental humanities can be seen as an academic response to these challenges. This chapter contends digital and geographical information science (GIScience) approaches to “Humanities Big Data” in conjunction with multidisciplinary studies on oceans and cities will be crucial in coming to terms with global climate change. This chapter defines and describes digital environmental humanities practices by featuring two case studies in this emerging field. First, the digital/GIS work-in-progress component of an Environmental History of the North Atlantic 1400–1700 project will be discussed, followed by the Imagineering of SmartCity Lifeworlds as urban-cybernetic dimensions of the “Digital Anthropocene.” Lastly, the chapter argues that literacy in the digital environmental humanities will be necessary to tackle the global humanitarian and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

Acts of Perception: Samuel Becket, Time, Space and the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949

Situated in the wake of the first and second waves of the Digital Humanities, the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949 website provides interactive mapping and timeline features for academics and members of the public who are interested in the intersection of Irish literary culture, history, and environment. The site hosts Google Earth software produced interfaces with the EXHIBIT Timeline functions made available by the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) project, developed and hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Library. This papers case study maps the biographical lifepath of the writer Samuel Beckett using digital humanities techniques such as ergodicity, and deformance. The geo-digital-timeline mapping of his biography allows us to visualize the shift in Becketts literary perspective from a latent Cartesian verisimilitude to more phenomenological and ...

GIS and History: Epistemologies, Reflections, and Considerations

In March, the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They placed a gypsy woman at one end of the village and set up the telescope at the entrance of the tent. For the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the gypsy woman an arm’s length away. “Science has eliminated distance,” Melquiades proclaimed. “In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.”