Geographical Imaginations as Interdisciplinary

Although the spatial humanities extend beyond the discipline of geography, it offers a useful place to start given geographers’ dedicated focus on place and space, as well as the tendency for geographical research to challenge boundaries of all kinds, including its own disciplinary boundaries. For example, in her work on African Diaspora research, Judith Carney describes geography as “the hallmark of interdisciplinarity” (2010). Her words highlight the ways in which geographers’ focus on concepts of place, space, and mobility open up connections beyond the discipline. Historical geographers and environmental historians also incorporate elements of time, history, and memory into these spatial or environmental pursuits, and the integration of historical and geographical knowledges for studying past places, or placing the past, require at least some degree of boundary-stretching and discipline-crossing.

The etymology of geography translates to “earth writing.” Yet, as we show in this course, writing and storytelling about the earth is not limited to geographers. Furthermore, even those who have trained as geographers have exceptionally varied inquiries and writings about the earth, from cultural-historical to economic geographers, or from physical to digital geographers. Other translations of geography include not just earth writing but also inscribing, carving, or etching. It is worth considering how these slight changes in language open up new possibilities for earth storying in ways that stretch the “geographical imagination” (Daniels, 2011), whether the geo-stories that result are written, inscribed, carved, or etched – or perhaps vibrated, imprinted, spoken, touched, dreamed, mapped, graphed, danced, scanned, digitized, photographed, or sculpted. Most likely, all digital spatial storytelling involves some combination of these, in part because the creative space of inquiry is so collaborative.

HGIS as Collaboration

In the Historical GIS (HGIS) module, we drew on Bonnell and Fortin’s (2014) overview of HGIS as a collaborativeprocess that involves contributions from people with diverse and specialized skillsets. However, in addition to people, digital humanities tools like HGIS also involve the assembling of different materials, spaces, machines, and other non-human agents. As Griffin and Hayler (2018) explain, digital humanities collaboration or “co-working” can refer to a variety of intersectional activities and interactions. They summarize these interactions as: 1) human/human, 2) human/material-machine, and 3) machine/material-machine/material, the latter of which acknowledges the often-overlooked materiality of digital relationships. We encourage you to visit their article for further detail on the distinctions.

Collaboration in the digital humanities also has different spatialities: it is co-locational, involving multiple places (and multiple locations within the same place); it often includes working across boundaries and borders (e.g. interdisciplinary or international collaborations) or translating across bodies and materialities (e.g. humans translating information from machines, and vice versa); and it re-spatializes the world by re-interpreting places and times, expanding or creating new knowledges, and re-imagining futures.

In the next sub-section, we will focus on the notion of crossing (or transcending, blurring, or redrawing) boundaries with a focus on interdisciplinary relationships in geohumanities research that focuses on environmental change.

Boundary-crossings: Critical approaches to interdisciplinarity

 Writing about environmental history as another deeply interdisciplinary space, Pawson and Dovers (2003) describe interdisciplinarity not only as the conscious integration of multiple knowledges and methods into a given research project, but a more critical, reflexive “willingness to see why others ask different questions, the ways in which they construct and interpret evidence, and how they represent their findings.” When we consider the emergence of hybridized fields like digital and spatial humanities, environmental history, historical climatology, SciArt, and arts computing, it becomes clear that there is no shortage of opportunity to ask such questions about what knowledge production means in different contexts, and how well they can work together.

One key site where this willingness was most often put to the test was beyond traditional academic settings, in the field, with researchers descending on particular places, environments, and communities to collaborate on a particular area of inquiry (Hemsworth, 2020). Although long associated with the sciences and social sciences, fieldwork remains a common practice of researchers across disciplines; as Berkeley geographer, James Parsons, wrote in 1977, fieldwork shapes researchers into “as much humanists and historians, as scientists.”

Of course, the parameters of the field have only expanded since. In the digital humanities, for instance, interdisciplinary collaboration is just as (or more) likely to occur through digital research, writing, and communication. The distinctions between the archive, lab, and field become even more blurred. Consider, for example, what digital “fields” might entail, be they: fields of data, GIS platforms, social media, or online communities. Just like other fields, all come with their own histories, cultures, and politics. As we will highlight further along the module, historical GIS is a particularly illustrative terrain for the kinds of questions that arise with the interdisciplinary capacities of digital humanities research (Knowles, 2016).

This course showcases digital spatial humanities projects from all kinds of academic and community settings, but is also designed to highlight the large-scale, interdisciplinary projects coming out of Nipissing University’s Centre for Understanding Semi-Peripheries (CUSP). In the following sections, we detail two CUSP projects, both of which tell cultural, historical, and environmental stories about change. The authors of this module, Hemsworth and Castle, are both members of CUSP with permission to reproduce the work here. In presenting the storymaps through this module, we are also doing our own storytelling about interdisciplinary collaboration.