Introduction: Course Reflections

“At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships.”

(Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies, 2010: 39)

“We suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. Caring thus consists of the sum total of practices by which we take care of ourselves, others and the natural world.”

(Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 1993: 103)

We have now reached the final module for this course. We wish to begin by thanking you for engaging with the material along the way. We have created a challenging course that foregrounds the importance of critical historical and geographical approaches in (and about) the digital humanities. This focus has included an examination of how geospatial technologies have been used across the digital and spatial humanities to learn and share different stories about past, present, and future worlds. One way to learn about these technologies, their capacities, and their challenges, is through practice; so, we have also invited you to learn geospatial tools and techniques like georeferencing, historical GIS, and mapping historical narratives in the lab activities, the lessons and skills of which can be applied to future digital storytelling projects (including, we hope, the capstone project for this course).

Another approach has been to facilitate critical engagement with the layered histories of the disciplines and technologies that have been most associated with geographical knowledge production. This involves interrogating how they have been used for different political projects that have perpetuated uneven power relations through domination, control, colonization, discovery, dispossession, and even genocide.  Although it may be tempting to point to those practices and suggest they are part of the past, or celebrate the reconfiguring of power and space afforded by digital technological change, social inequities endure and emerge in different forms; and it is for this reason that we urge students to remember this critical, historical context when embarking on new digital-spatial storytelling projects. Of course, as evidenced through examples we highlighted in the interdisciplinary collaboration, art-creation, and counter-mapping modules, there is also hope to be found in the use of geospatial tools and knowledges to re-write, re-map, and re-claim. Working reflexively with this potential can lead to more nuanced stories of place while also inspiring social change and spatial justice.

We have used a plethora of examples that can be loosely described under the umbrella of the “spatial humanities,” “geohumanities,” or “creative geovisualization,” to illustrate the convergences between geography, history, art, literature, science, computing, cultural studies, and the many spaces beyond and in between. Many of the examples have come from our own collaborative projects as members of the Centre for Understanding Semi-Peripheries (CUSP) at Nipissing University, and we are grateful to the many partners, collaborators, and friends we have met in this capacity who have enriched our understanding of what it means to “take up space” whether as an intellectual project or as settlers collaborating in a partnership with Indigenous communities on Anishinaabeg territory. The examples we have used throughout the course invite further questions regarding the multiplicity of meanings and spatialities of collaboration, whether the collaboration is across disciplines, beings, knowledges, interfaces, or data.

There are many places to go from here. What follows is a gesture toward some “hopeful futures” that might be further explored and built through the digital humanities. We focus on three areas that are inspired by the critical and care-ful aspects of the digital and spatial turns over the past couple decades: disciplinary transformations, reparatory history, and webs of care.