Tag » GIS « | Hestia

Topographic Unconsciousness

[This is a guest post by Akiyoshi Suzuki (Nagasaki University), with a summary of his Hestia@Birmingham presentation on the subject: ‘A Good Map is Worth a Thousand Words: 3-D Topographic Narrative of Haruki Murakami’]

The mapping of novels has been popular in Japan, either for simply providing a guide to fans wishing to follow the footsteps of the characters or else for bringing to the surface the unconscious, the blind spots or else the novel’s biopolitics. For readers of Murakami’s fiction, however, mapping is uncertain; the characters’ trails are strange and mysterious. And a constant refrain is heard, as when Naoko in Norwegian Wood asks, “Where are we?”.

Seminars Posted by Enrico Daga 04 Aug 2014 / 0 comments

Beyond images and surfaces: Impressions from the ‘Telling stories with maps’ symposium in Birmingham

As we have already written on this blog, the fourth event within the Hestia 2 programme recently took place in Birmingham. With its focus on qualitative GIS and narrative mapping, this symposium was closest to my own academic interests and motivations for participating in the project. Its selection of papers, audience and topics achieved one of the long-standing aims of the Hestia team: to bring together the social sciences, humanities and the ‘IT crowd’ in a genuine interdisciplinary dialogue. Testifying to the success of the event were the high attendance rate, the diverse professional backgrounds of participants, and the numerous follow up discussions instigated on different fora (particularly twitter and the ‘blogosphere’).

Seminars Posted by Enrico Daga 16 May 2014 / 0 comments

Hestia2@Birmingham 30 April 2014

This week sees the third workshop taking place as part of Hestia 2. The event is being hosted by the University of Birmingham’s Digital Humanities Hub, which seems appropriate as it is a facility dedicated to bringing together scholars and practitioners from across disciplines interested in different ways of visualising the world.

The theme of the workshop is qualitative GIS – techniques for exploring non-numerical data through mapping. This is a relatively new field, although not without important precedents. Historically, cartographers would add a range of images to their maps. These could range from drawings of mythical beasts animating far off lands to town plans complete with sketches of key buildings. These drawings went beyond cold, scientific representation to tell us something about the way places were imagined and lived. As Geographical Information Systems (GIS) were developed in the 1960s and 1970s they became a tool for representing numerical data, reflecting the fashion at the time for using computers to ask new, highly quantitative, research questions. In GIS, places are all-too-easily reduced to points, lines and polygons, all of which can have values attached to them. Conventionally these values were either numeric or comprised basic text strings, but as computers became more powerful in the 1980s, longer texts, photographs, audio and video could be added.

News / Seminars Posted by Enrico Daga 30 Apr 2014 / 0 comments

Telling stories with maps: the geoweb, qualitative GIS and narrative mapping

Digital Humanities Hub, University of Birmingham, 30 April 2014

Call for papers

As part of the Hestia 2 seminar series exploring the different ways in which humanistic approaches to data visualization are challenging and transforming existing mapping practices, we are pleased to invite contributions to a one-day workshop that will examine the specific role of GIS in mapping texts of different kinds.

News / Seminars / Suggested reading Posted by Enrico Daga 24 Feb 2014 / 0 comments

Why Update ORBIS?

There’s a lot of digital humanities left to be done. There are books that haven’t been digitized that need to be mined to find trends to put on maps using algorithms that haven’t even been designed yet. So, when you consider that the significant effort necessary to put a new finish on a project like ORBIS, you might think it’s a waste of time. I know I get a bit uncomfortable about it when I consider the other projects that were proposed and which lost out on achieving some measure of implementation because of the support for a version 2 of ORBIS. It’s not a zero sum game that we have going in this field, but it does suffer from entrenchment and there are natural inducements to supporting existing, successful work that can foster a rich-get-richer climate.

News / Seminars Posted by Elton Barker 09 Jan 2014 / 0 comments

Reflections on the Southampton Workshop

I’ve come into Hestia2 feeling like a bit of an interloper, asked by my former colleague Stefan Bouzarovski to join the original team in order to organise one of the workshops (which we’ll be holding in Birmingham in the new year). So it was with a little trepidation that I made my way down to Southampton for the inaugural meeting on a baking hot 18 July. Meeting Elton Barker and other members of the team for the first time further convinced me that I’m part of a really exciting project.

Seminars Posted by Enrico Daga 24 Jul 2013 / 0 comments