Introduction

What are digital places?

What are the spatialities of digital technologies?

How have digital technologies re-spatialized life and the stories we tell about it?

These are important questions for digital spatial storytelling, particularly in how they seek to understand the relationships between digital technologies, place, and social life.

When we talk about these digital relationships with place, we are not just referring to the representation of place through the digital, which is certainly important here, but also the making of place. In this module, we will examine the digitization of place, and the places and spaces of the digital.

For human geographers, the digital turn has raised new questions about “the geographies produced through, produced by, and of the digital” (Ash, Kitchen, Leszczynski, 2018: 27). We apply this line of questioning throughout the course, extending it to the spatial humanities more broadly. In other words, in addition to considering the effect of the digital on the (in our case, historical) geographies of everyday life, we invite students to consider how digital-spatial approaches also reimagine the stories we tell about the earth, realizing that geographies are stories, and stories are geographies.

Following the course focus on historical geographies and spatial storytelling, disciplinary histories and other historiographies are important for understanding the emergence of digital humanities. We will begin, therefore, with an exploration of the spatial and digital turns, including how they have intersected to inform digital spatial humanities scholarship today. It is important to note that the timelines and trajectories of these turns should be read as generalized and did not necessarily take the same shape, nor timing, across the many disciplines in the digital humanities that would have been influenced by (or ignited) spatial and digital turns.