Join us at the Liberal Arts Action Lab at 10 Constitution Plaza on Friday February 28th, 2020 from 12-1pm for a free lecture by two leaders in the areas of historical GIS and the spatial and geohumanities: Anne Kelly Knowles and LaDale Winling. Co-sponsored by UConn, Capital Community College, and Trinity College. View the entire program. Free and open to the public. Lunch food provided: first come, first served.
Anne Kelly Knowles, Professor of History, University of Maine
Historical GIS & Beyond: GeoVisualization for the Humanities
Spatial storytelling and deep mapping are generating much interest in the Humanities as scholars and students discover new methods for representing people in place. At the same time, humanists’ critiques of the limitations of Cartesian cartography demand solutions. This lecture will argue that points, lines, and polygons (aptly called “cartographic primitives”) are immensely useful for certain kinds of spatial analysis, but that they are also deeply problematic for analyzing and representing human experience. The extreme experiences of Holocaust victims challenged my research team to find new ways to visualize people and places, mobility and awareness, as phenomena in their own right and in relation to Nazi policies and actions. I will particularly focus on two of our ongoing experiments: inductive visualization and topological mapping.
LaDale Winling, Associate Professor of History, Virginia Tech
Finding the Humanity in the Digital Humanities.
As digital technologies and data resources become increasingly sophisticated, digital humanities and historical GIS scholars hold both the promise and the peril of demonstrating the humanity in their projects. Winling will discuss his work on redlining and political elections in Mapping Inequality, Electing the House of Representatives, and the Chicago Elections Project and the challenges of incorporating and enabling narrative, of making argument, and of finding and representing individuals in a sea of data.
