Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration in the Spatial Humanities
Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration in the Spatial Humanities
Geographical Imaginations as Interdisciplinary
Although the spatial humanities extend beyond the discipline of geography, it offers a useful place to start given geographers’ dedicated focus on place and space, as well as the tendency for geographical research to challenge boundaries of all kinds, including its own disciplinary boundaries. For example, in her work on African Diaspora research, Judith Carney describes geography as “the hallmark of interdisciplinarity” (2010). Her words highlight the ways in which geographers’ focus on concepts of place, space, and mobility open up connections beyond the discipline. Historical geographers and environmental historians also incorporate elements of time, history, and memory into these spatial or environmental pursuits, and the integration of historical and geographical knowledges for studying past places, or placing the past, require at least some degree of boundary-stretching and discipline-crossing.
The etymology of geography translates to “earth writing.” Yet, as we show in this course, writing and storytelling about the earth is not limited to geographers. Furthermore, even those who have trained as geographers have exceptionally varied inquiries and writings about the earth, from cultural-historical to economic geographers, or from physical to digital geographers. Other translations of geography include not just earth writing but also inscribing, carving, or etching. It is worth considering how these slight changes in language open up new possibilities for earth storying in ways that stretch the “geographical imagination” (Daniels, 2011), whether the geo-stories that result are written, inscribed, carved, or etched – or perhaps vibrated, imprinted, spoken, touched, dreamed, mapped, graphed, danced, scanned, digitized, photographed, or sculpted. Most likely, all digital spatial storytelling involves some combination of these, in part because the creative space of inquiry is so collaborative.
HGIS as Collaboration
In the Historical GIS (HGIS) module, we drew on Bonnell and Fortin’s (2014) overview of HGIS as a collaborativeprocess that involves contributions from people with diverse and specialized skillsets. However, in addition to people, digital humanities tools like HGIS also involve the assembling of different materials, spaces, machines, and other non-human agents. As Griffin and Hayler (2018) explain, digital humanities collaboration or “co-working” can refer to a variety of intersectional activities and interactions. They summarize these interactions as: 1) human/human, 2) human/material-machine, and 3) machine/material-machine/material, the latter of which acknowledges the often-overlooked materiality of digital relationships. We encourage you to visit their article for further detail on the distinctions.
Collaboration in the digital humanities also has different spatialities: it is co-locational, involving multiple places (an