David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris write in The Spatial Humanities (2010) that spatial humanities “promises to revitalize and redefine scholarship” (vii). Ten years later, we can interrogate how the so-called “spatial turn,” encouraged by the availability of geographic information systems (GIS), did and did not live up to this promise, especially for undergraduates. For the last ten years, the spatial humanities have largely been synonymous with uses of GIS, which include deep mapping, animated maps, and text-based geographical analysis. Ian Gregory and Alistair Geddes (2014) offer a necessary investigation into the conflict at the center of spatial humanities: it may reinvigorate the humanities as promised or is it may signal a “lurch toward an unacceptable form of positivism” (ix). Stuart Dunn’s “Praxes of ‘The Human’ and ‘The Digital’” (2016) helpfully examines what is at stake in the “digitization of space” through GIS and how the uncountable and fuzzy features of a space intersect with or are erased by the quantitative measures of geospatial analysis. Jason Farman’s edited collection The Mobile Story (2014) invigoratingly expands the available modes of inquiry by turning away from GIS and toward other forms of digital storytelling made possible by mobile technology. Farman seeks to understand how a space’s dominant narrative comes to us through durable media while the narratives of the margins comes through more ephemeral and frequently digital media. This panel is largely concerned with how Farman’s perspective can direct our curricula and pedagogies. A decade after the pronouncement in The Spatial Humanities, the promise has been problematized, multiplied, and sometimes simplified, and we aim to understand how we can recruit the consistently broadening and deeply complicated methods of spatial and digital humanities in the classroom.
The panel is organized to illustrate three ways of building from the GIS and map-based digital projects that have become familiar in the site-specific curricula of writing and literature classrooms. The presentations showcase how new media tools—smaller, more mobile, and more user-friendly—can be used in creating more sophisticated projects that critically interrogate marginalized narratives and who has the rights and responsibilities to tell them. Collaborations with community stakeholders, immersive storytelling that involves interacting with digital interfaces as well as physical spaces, and deep mapping made with a suite of digital production tools all represent adaptations to new technologies and new imperatives for more care, creativity, and empathy brought to bear on teaching digital approaches to space.
Matt Applegate will begin by presenting an assignment sequence he designed for a study abroad program in Rome, a sequence culminating in a student-created interactive map of the city. Applegate’s curriculum is remarkable for how it leverages a durable media production tool set designed to fit in a backpack, what he calls the Spatial Humanities Kit (SHK), toward enabling students to develop skills in critical visualization, multimodal composition, and basic HTML. Both prior to departure and on location in Rome, students followed Farman’s methods of mobile storytelling to investigate how absence and exclusion in the areas of migration, labor, and infrastructure impact places in the city and can be represented digitally. This site-specific course builds on GIS-enabled methods of analysis and representation to help students draw out Rome’s diverse cultural history, particularly as a means of visualizing what is excluded contemporarily.
Elaborating on the digital humanities’ role in amplifying the minoritized voices in place-based classes, Andrew Uzendoski will present on how collaboration, service-learning, and online exhibits are at work in his class on ethnic American literature at Lafayette College. The final assignment for the class asks students to curate a public online exhibit on the lived experiences of African Americans in the Lehigh Valley, where Lafayette is located. Students selected materials from archives created by the Easton branch of the NAACP, the Sigal Museum, and Lafayette College Libraries. Students analyzed and organized the archival material using course readings, and, during the process, collaborated with local NAACP affiliates. In this way, digital approaches to a rural space fosters more profound and intersectional relations among the diverse communities living in that space. Students developed digital literacy while also engaging in meaningful conversation with community stakeholders across the Lehigh Valley.
Finally, Catherine Winters will present an interactive program utilized in a range of classes at the University of Rhode Island. “Giving Voice: A URI Experience” combines physical space at URI with Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Lowlands (2013), which largely takes place on the URI campus, to create an immersive experience of the campus with the help of a mobile app and audio excerpts from the novel. “Giving Voice” asks students to move through the spaces described in Lahiri’s novel and more fully register the feelings of uncertainty, alienation, and indifference that plague its characters. While social media and the internet in general frequently exemplifies the difficulty of understanding others’ experiences, Winters’ project encourages empathy with the diverse experiences at the campus, a reconsideration of the comfort of the familiar, and a physical connection with a literary text. Digital spaces and physical places overlap and shed new light on one another. To explore some of these freshly available points of contact between the digital and the physical as well as the stakes of investigating them in the classroom are the primary ambitions of this panel.