Digital Arts and Humanities Brown Bag Series
Presented by the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH)
David J. Bodenhamer

Professor of History & Executive Director,The Polis Center at IUPUI

“Space, Time, and Place: The Emergence of the Spatial Humanities”

Audio & Powerpoint of Presentation

Over the past several decades, concepts of space have taken on new meaning for humanists. Themes of regions, diasporas, and contact zones and rubrics such as “border” and “boundary” challenge periodization as a way of ordering scholarly investigations. New technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have both facilitated and burdened this (re)discovery of space for humanists. The power of GIS lies in its ability to integrate data from a common space, regardless of its format, and to visualize the results in combinations of transparent layers on a map of the geography shared by the data. Yet until recently GIS has had only limited ability to move us beyond a map of geographical space into a richer, more evocative concepts of place based on history and memory.  Increasingly, it offers capabilities that humanists could employ with profit, although on the whole we have not.  Over the past few years, GIScientists have made advances in spatial multi-media, in GIS-enabled web services, geo-visualization, cyber geography, and virtual reality that provide capabilities far exceeding the abilities of GIS on its own. This convergence of technologies has the potential to revolutionize the role of place in the digital humanities by allowing us to move far beyond the static map, to shift from two dimensions to multidimensional representations, to develop interactive systems, and to explore space and place dynamically—in effect, to create virtual worlds embodying what we know about space and place.

Thursday, February 18, 2010
12-1 p.m.
Wells Library Media Showing Room, E174
(Between the glass doors that lead to the Library parking lot)

Remote connection also available via Adobe Acrobat Connect:
To join the meeting: http://breeze.iu.edu/idahbb/
After the presentation, recordings will be posted on the IDAH website’s brown bag page:  http://www.iub.edu/~idah/bb.shtml?n1=bb

Please join us!  Feel free to bring your lunch.

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