“Maps are neither mirrors of nature nor neutral transmitters of universal truths. They are narratives with a purpose, stories with an agenda. They contain silences as well as articulations, secrets as well as knowledge, lies as well as truth.”

-John Rennie Short (The World Through Maps: A History of Cartography, p. 24)

“Maps, in their most traditional sense as a representation of authority, have incredible power and have been essential to colonial and imperial projects.”

-Mishuana Goeman (Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, p. 16)

Welcome to Digital Storytelling in the Spatial Humanities!

In this course, we will explore the intersections of the digital and spatial humanities, focusing on two overlapping themes in historical geography: the digitization of place and the digital (re-)storying of the past. Course literature traverses the fields of digital humanities, geohumanities (including geographic information systems, or GIS), cultural-historical geography, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, and environmental history, among others.

Throughout the course, you will learn about different kinds of spatial media and spatial methods with opportunities to discuss, share, and create. This includes engaging with digital mapping and spatial archives tools of storytelling (sometimes called storymapping). It will also involve building a critical understanding of the historical power relations that shape storymapping approaches, often called critical cartography (Crampton and Krygier, 2005). Course readings and assignments combine theoretical and practical experience in several areas, including: georeferencing (and working with georeferenced) historical data; locating and synthesizing research material in digital and spatial archives; spatially representing historical narratives; analyzing maps across different media landscapes; and creating your own digital maps to communicate complex stories.

We use the term ‘story’ throughout the course in a purposely broad sense – a way of perceiving, understanding, and communicating something, somewhere, and sometime in the world. In the spatial humanities, storytelling refers more explicitly to the stories told about and through place and space, although it has been noted that all stories exist in space – everything happens (or happened) somewhere. Our broad interpretation includes scientific knowledge as a form of storytelling. Indeed, the histories of scientific knowledge production tell all kinds of stories about the people, places, politics, economies, environments, and societies. We will highlight examples that demonstrate the role of settler colonialism in shaping spatial narrative, and we will consider how spatial media, such as GIS, can be used to study the historical geographies of settler colonialism.

The course draws on community-oriented, interdisciplinary projects coming out of Nipissing University’s Centre for Understanding Semi-Peripheries (CUSP), which use historical-GIS (HGIS) to share place-based narratives about the past. As is often the case with online digital humanities projects, the CUSP examples used are (at the point of writing this module) in progress, updating as research evolves and as new stories emerge. We will also examine digital geography and spatial humanities projects from other researchers across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Placing this course: Thinking critically about “land” in digital and pre-digital contexts

Given that this course features digital content and may be delivered online to students across vast distances, one way of placing, situating, or locating this course would be through latitude and longitude coordinates or even the open location (or “plus”) codes increasingly available on web mapping platforms. We will address these locative methods and media in the modules to come, but our focus on place and history also reminds us of the importance of acknowledging the land from which this course emerged.

Digital Storytelling in the Spatial Humanities was developed and is offered through Nipissing University, which is situated on the traditional territory of the Nbisiing Anishinaabeg and is within lands protected by the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850. The land has long been stewarded by communities of Nipissing First Nation and Dokis First Nation, with the physical campus sitting on former Nipissing First Nation land. Now owned by Nipissing University, the campus land is considered part of what is now called the city of North Bay in Ontario, Canada. This region is often termed the “Near North” – providing further spatial considerations for a course that considers how place is conceptualized and represented through digital approaches. What does it mean to acknowledge land in the digital context? We will delve into these layered, place-based histories more deeply throughout the course through several GIS-based storymap examples coming out of Nipissing University’s Centre for Understanding Semi-Peripheries (CUSP).

There are many other ways of “situating” the university, and digital media present new opportunities to broaden what it means to tell stories about place. We encourage you to return to this partial overview of the traditional and treaty territories, as well as some of the other geographies mentioned in this brief acknowledgment, to help situate yourself within the digital-physical-cultural landscapes of this course. In considering the questions below, we invite you to reflect on your own positionality or situated knowledge and their impact on your learning as you engage with the course material.

What kinds of cultural histories do you bring to the course that might shape how you engage with place and place-based storytelling?

How does taking an online course differ from taking it in person, in terms of your sense of place (or how you “place” the course in your mind)?

We will expect you to bring a critical perspective to the multi-layered histories and geographies (from individual to global scales) expressed through the digital spatial media you encounter through this course. Consider what kinds of histories are preserved, silenced, challenged, or retold through digital spatial narratives, and remain aware that just because digital media offer greater capacity for telling multi-layered and dynamic stories of place, does not mean this capacity is always used or achieved.