Spatial Humanities

Digital methods, media and platforms are playing an increasingly critical role in the formation and analysis of place in the contemporary world but to date. At the same time, the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the Digital Humanities (and the humanities and social sciences more broadly) and the maturing of the fields of Quantitative and Critical Geographical Information Systems have changed our perception of place, and our perception of how we interpret place, and its sister concept of space. The same applies to place created by, and derived from, historical and cultural sources.

Hence, the need for a book length study which traces a trajectory between historical/cultural constructions of place - what this author calls ‘humanistic place’ - and applications of the GeoWeb. This book provides such a trajectory by examining current approaches to the analysis and definition of place in three fundamental historical and cultural discourse spaces of the humanities, text, maps, and objects. Next to this, it examines how place is created in the contemporary digital world.

Stuart Dunn is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King's College London. He is an archaeologist with interests in the history of cartography, digital approaches to landscape studies, and spatial humanities