Place? But I'm a Historian. Give me Time.

Well, I just finished the readings and I feel like I should spit something out while my head is still reeling.

First off, I've gotta hand it to Bodenhamer in the Introduction passage for pointing out that this whole
GIS approach doesn't necessarily jive well with humanists. Inputting data, grids, coordinates, NUMBERS?!
I don't know about the rest of you humanists but part of the reason I was drawn to the humanities was to seek refuge from numbers. And don't even get me started on using the numbers. Maths are the bane of my existence.

Needless to say I found this weeks topic slightly troublesome. Especially when Novack mentioned that GIS has a steep learning curve. Text encoding. Fine. GIS, not so much.

That being said, I will admit that there are some interesting implications to using maps. They do seem like they could be a big help in conceptualizing patterns over time. The consideration of place, especially situated in time seems so simple. But it's also something we as historians often overlook or take for granted. Yea it's something that we often to take into account but it's often cursory... And when references to place are embedded in the textual descriptions we often only formulate our conceptions of place in the broadest of terms. There's no doubt in my mind that GIS and interactive mapping will help to generate more of the questions that drive humanists in their quest for meaning. We can make concrete our conceptions of place in time, or over time. This is good, we are finally moving beyond text. In this post textual age the field needs to incorporate fresh methods. But, like I said... I don't particularly want to be the one doing the design work on the maps.

The concept of teamwork brought up in the Knowles reading is a good one. Perhaps it is time to dispel the age old image of the lone wolf historian. Perhaps this is something to think about in a graduate program. Interdisciplinary teams working together on a project. An historian working with a geographer and sociologist on an HGIS project could produce far more interesting results than teams made up of a few people from the same discipline. Although I'm sure there are bureaucratic hurdles that woulds prevent any such endeavor from being undertaken at a graduate student level.

I look forward to our discussion because like Val, this is all new to me. Our discussions certainly help me better understand some of the concepts being discussed in the readings. And I could definitely have a firmer grasp on all things GIS. Spencer's explanation of the Ngram in last weeks discussion for example made me realize that I had been placing too much scholarly weight on the tool. I should have taken it as something more akin to wikipedia than perhaps a peer reviewed journal article... to revert back to a more comfortable text based analogy. Although I still hold to true all of my rantings and ravings regarding distant reading and the proliferation of information!