1. Geospatial Narrative
Perspectives from the humanities,
cartography and GIScience
Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR)
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA)
May 7, 2015

2. panelists
• David O’Sullivan
– Professor of Geography, UC Berkeley
• Anne Knowles (w/Levi Westerveld)
– Professor of Geography, Middlebury College
• Erik Steiner
– Cartographer, Geographer; Creative Director, Spatial History Project
• Nicole Coleman
– Research Director, Humanities + Design
• Nicholas Bauch
– Geographer, Postdoc @ Spatial History
• Karl Grossner
– Geographer, DH Developer @ CIDR

3. questions
• Does historical simulation open significant untapped
avenues for new historical spatial narratives or is it too
reductionist to be accepted by/useful to humanists?
• Is there a place for performative art in the spatial
humanities? Or does art lack the empirical and
representational rigor that is necessary to comprehend
data and derive meaning?
• what does “spatial narrative” mean?
• how does it differ from verbal narrative: is that even a
meaningful distinction? a genuine binary?
• what’s missing or inadequate in existing tools, models,
methods?

4. Center for Interdisciplinary
Digital Research (CIDR)
• The Academic Technology Specialist team, working directly in and with
selected academic departments to improve teaching, learning, and
research by implementing and developing new technologies.
• Social Science Data and Software offers data, software, workshops, and
consultations for data-based social science research and teaching.
• Digital humanities research developers provide focused project support
for the Stanford scholarly community via an annual call for proposals. The
DH developer team maintains a rich gallery of projects both already
published and in-progress.
• The Humanities Text Service (hText) provides access to textual and other
digital resources for research and teaching.

5. Narrative
• account, story, tale, chronicle
• “An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given
in order and with the establishing of connections
between them”
• “A representation of a history, biography, process,
etc., in which a sequence of events has been
constructed into a story in accordance with a
particular ideology”
• geospatial narrative: one product of the practice
of both spatial history and historical geography

6. Spatial History Project

7. Spatial History Project

9. SPACE
TIME
THEME
The Geographic Matrix
Approaches to Regional Analysis: A Synthesis
Brian J. L. Berry, Univ. of Chicago, 1964

10. Perspectives and definitions
space
time
theme

11. “…the intersection of qualitative geographic information
systems (GIS), narrative analysis, 3D GIS-based time-
geographic methods, and computer-aided qualitative
data analysis.”

12. “I suggest that the more successful examples
of critically informed GIS are those where
researchers informed by social theory have
been willing to engage with the technology,
rather than to criticize from the outside.”

18. questions
• Does historical simulation open significant untapped
avenues for new historical spatial narratives or is it too
reductionist to be accepted by/useful to humanists?
• Is there a place for performative art in the spatial
humanities? Or does art lack the empirical and
representational rigor that is necessary to comprehend
data and derive meaning?
• what does “spatial narrative” mean?
• how does it differ from verbal narrative: is that even a
meaningful distinction? a genuine binary?
• what’s missing or inadequate in existing tools, models,
methods?