Introduction
Where do geography, arts, and (digital) humanities converge?
As we approach the end of the course, it would seem as though the answer could be just about anywhere, although the spatialities of this convergence are dynamic and uneven. Indeed, by now it should not be surprising that the spatial humanities are as much about art-creation as they are about geospatial knowledge production. Although not the only example of geospatial media, maps are as much about narration and aesthetic design as they are about location and navigation. The arts, too, are deeply spatial and temporal. After all, what is art, if not the creative expression and interplay of space-time?
These intersections create opportunities for geospatial art-creation across the digital and spatial humanities that facilitate new kinds of exchanges, relationships, and interfaces. To suggest that geography, arts, and humanities are closely linked, however, does not mean the overlap between them is seamless or experienced in homogeneous ways (Hawkins, 2013). Furthermore, what might now be called “cARTography” and “creative geovisualization” has been shaped by a long history of collaboration across the above-mentioned fields (Cosgrove, 2005; Jung, 2020).
Digital spatial storytelling embraces the social, cultural, political, and affective qualities of both art and space. It is perhaps for this reason that the digital humanities tend to be a site through which art-science collaboration proliferates. As Nicholson et al. (2019) explain, art-science collaborations, which are increasingly part of teaching and research praxis, are fueled by several factors, including but not limited to: the increasing push for accessibility and mobilization of knowledge beyond exclusive academic spaces; an interdisciplinary curiosity about highly complex landscapes and phenomena; and a re-invigorated engagement with uncertainty and experimentation as generative and emotive processes. As we discussed in the module on interdisciplinary collaboration, art-science collaborations must also involve questioning how power, information, and uncertainty are approached across different knowledge systems (Greer et al., 2018).
The digital and spatial turns have extended those longstanding collaborations of historical and geographical art-creation while also sparking new and exciting kinds of storytelling, as we have seen throughout this course. One of the most obvious places to look for the more recent convergence of art and geospatial knowledge is through the digital storymapping capabilities of historical GIS. In fact, every example of HGIS storymapping we have highlighted in other modules could also be included here, as further examples of geospatial art-creation, given their collaborative, experimental, and multi-sensory characteristics. Although we introduce some new projects to exemplify art-creation in this module, we encourage you to revisit the many examples used throughout the course to consider how they, too, fit into this discussion of the convergence between art, geography, and the digital humanities.
Many of the modules to this point have highlighted projects that exemplify digital humanities practices of creative geovisualization through research tools like GIS. In the next section, we summarize the characteristics and approaches of creative geovisualization, before turning toward other more-than-visual approaches in digital storymapping.