The Digital Turn(s)
Rapid and extensive technological change in the twentieth century led to new questions about relationships between space, time, and society. The shift from analog (and other mechanical) to digital technologies between the 1950s-1970s (what is popularly known as the Digital Revolution) re-shaped disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. This occurred in all kinds of ways, including the topics, methods, and communication of research.
In geographical scholarship, the digital turn is often attributed to the advancements of digital geospatial technologies of the 1960s. Early engagements were rooted in quantitative methods of computing for statistical analysis and modeling. This was followed by digital developments in geographic information science (GIS), remote sensing, and photogrammetry. Critical GIS followed in the 1990s, drawing digital technologies to inform “feminist critiques of both science and (scientific) representation to challenge the supposed neutrality of GIS” (Ash, Kitchen, and Leszczynski, 2018: 27). However, a major challenge in writing about the turn seems to be that it is still occurring, taking on new shapes and questions.
Disciplines like history, previously (and perhaps unfairly) labeled as slow to adapt to technological change, have transformed considerably through an uptake in digital technologies and methods. The use of digital tools, such as GIS and geodatabases, has also shaped historians’ engagement withspatiality, further demonstrating how spatial and digital turns were connected in both interest and impact (Hillier and Knowles, 2008). As we discuss in the next module, related spaces and repositories of historical knowledge production, such as museums and archives, have also adapted considerably in the uptake of digital media for preservation, management, and sharing of collections.
In other areas across the digital humanities, digital imaging has particularly led to a re-imagining of what can be visualized and how, leading to enriched forms of research and storytelling. Gillian Rose (2016: 337) analyzes these changes:
Images, for example, from the very simple to the highly complex, can be created, copied, repurposed, shared and modified by anyone with a smartphone and a computer, while the comment box, the ‘like’ button, and the blog are distributing the role of the critic much more widely. Because of the high levels of participation that these various innovations have unleashed, few of the scholars who have followed these changes speak of ‘producers’ and ‘audiences’ as two distinct groups and activities: the preferred term is ‘user’ (Hartley, 2012; Jenkins, 2008; Livingstone, 2005).
The latter part of that quotation identifies another shift beyond thinking of the digital turn as technological change, but also changes in meanings around subjectivity. Shifts in terminology from ‘producers’ and ‘audiences’ to ‘users’ are worth considering further on your own time and are useful to keep in mind throughout the course. Indeed, these are excellent examples of critical questions posed by scholars across digital humanities regarding subjectivity, use, and convergence in a digital world.
Convergences: Digital Place and Space
Digitization of Place
One of the main themes that ties together the digital and spatial humanities is the digitization of place. Extending Unsworth’s definition of digitization, Stuart Dunn provides the following conceptualization of what it means to digitize place:
I consider the digitization of place to mean the production of any digital media in which place (or space) is represented, either semantically or in Cartesian vector or raster form, which derives from information in the human material, cultural, or intellectual record. (2017: 89)
Dunn makes an important clarification about how digitization might be conceptualized across the digital and spatial humanities. He writes, “Digitization has never just been about building resources for (re)use by other scholars, but rather about exposing the thing or things being digitized to new critical processes and analyses using digital methods” (102-103). Digitizing place, therefore, leads to new meanings and enactments of place.
Indeed, over the past few decades, digital media have increasingly been used to represent the idea or concept of (a) place, removing or at the very least changing the physicality typically associated with a given place. It is important to recognize, however, that the digitization of place does not always entail the removal of physicality or materiality entirely, nor does it remove “the body” from experiences of place. Rather, digitization can also involve changing or respatializing the physicality while still having very material, embodied effects on physical beings and objects.
Cultural geographers are particularly well-placed to study how the saturation of digital technology in many parts of the world have changed the ways people engage with and create place. We can think of the relationships between place and the digital in a number of ways, some of which are described below.
Perhaps the most obvious is the production and use of digital media that represents place. Here, we can point to the rise in geolocation technologies, including geocoding and geotagging practices made possible through digital media, including GPS, GIS, smartphones, and geolocation apps. Digital maps and geovisualizations are used to represent past, present, and future places, blurring lines of real/imagined, material/immaterial, or online/offline. Digital (re)creations of place also extend into place-based or world-building media such as video games (consider the places built through “Animal Crossing”or “Minecraft,” for example).
In addition to building and representing worlds through digital technologies, everyday experiences of life are increasingly mediatedthrough the digital. Smart cities, in particular, incorporate digital technology into urban design such that the city and the digital are inseparable, perhaps better described as functioning as a network or interface. In other places, especially the Global North, cities are also saturated with screens that become part of the urban fabric, and digital technologies play a key role in the management of people and spaces. Examples include a shift from manual to digital operations of manufacturing plants, GIS-based transportation networks, as well as continuous, pervasive, digital surveillance both on the street and from a distance. Digital design has also respatialized mobilities of people, goods, and ideas, although often in uneven and inequitable ways. Consider, for example, the increasing use of digital codes or access cards required to enter buildings, access bathrooms, board an airplane, or borrow books from a public library.
Returning to the notion of space being social, and social life being spatial, it is clear that digital engagementsactively build places and spaces. These include online communities through forums, chatrooms, and social media groups, as well as new spaces established through videocommunications technologies (such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams). In some cases, these platforms are designed to mimic real-world places, such as the “breakout rooms” commonly used in online teaching to simulate smaller group environments. However, such technologies are more than representational; they are also constructive, performative, and generative.
Finally, the digitization of place has shaped how past and future places are (re)imagined. Throughout this course, we highlight examples of reconstructing past places through the digital and spatial humanities. These include reconstructing past climate through interdisciplinary research on environmental histories as well as using storymapping practices to re-centre Indigenous histories of colonized places. Toward the end, we consider the use of digital geospatial storytelling to imagine and build new, perhaps more equitable, places.
In the online discussion for this module, we encourage you to come up with your own ideas about how places are increasingly digital, and how digitization shapes place in material and conceptual ways. In the final subsection, we expand on some of the themes listed above through a specific focus on the spatial convergences, or new digital “ecologies” (Ash, 2015), of human practice, hardware devices, and software codes. In doing so, we highlight new potential for immersive spatialities in digital storytelling.
Digital Spatiality: Fluidity and Friction
Geospatial technologies, which sit at the intersections of these turns, are now inseparable from all kinds of knowledge production. Ash, Kitchen, and Leszczynski (2018) summarize:
Digital devices (computers, satellites, GPS, digital cameras, audio and video recorders, smartphones) and software packages (statistics programmes, spreadsheets, databases, GIS, qualitative analysis packages, word processing) have become indispensable to geographic practice and scholarship across sub-disciplines, regardless of conceptual approach.
What kinds of spaces do these devices produce, particularly in the context of digital and spatial humanities?
Gillian Rose, a cultural and feminist geographer of visual research, provides a critical overview of the new kinds of spatialities enacted through digital life. She highlights a shift analogue images and maps inviting reading or contemplation to a more immersivespatiality that invites action and expands the meaning of navigation (Rose 2016: 340):
Instead of a printed paper map proffering the signs on its surface for attentive reading, in a Google map we move from map to satellite view, zoom in and scale back, look at a photo of a street and return; instead of reading a painting or a photograph that does not change its form as we do so, in an online archive we scroll, zoom, crop, download, follow links, share. Digital images very often invite not contemplation but action, navigation into the larger mass of images of which they are a part, ‘keeping an eye out for where to move or what do to next’…
Rose focuses on three particular spatial relationships associated with digital technologies: a) interface, b) network, and c) friction. Rose argues that “interface”should replace the term “cultural object,” to recognize that digital media, such as the screens that seem to saturate daily life (in the Global North especially), are always intersections (or “ecologies”, citing Ash 2015) of human practices, hardware devices, and software code. They are not static objects, and they produce new kinds of friction through their interaction, including disruptions, crashes, and failures.
Rose’s work on this topic pushes the boundaries on what is considered an agent of power (often attributed to humans, even in digital contexts). Without dismissing the host of human actors involved in building digital networks, from engineers to cable layers, she also points to the more-than-human actors and processes:
In describing the networks that digital interfaces open onto, there is clearly an extensive and complex material infrastructure that stretches and locates digital cultural activity in physical space: cables, servers, drives, processors, exchanges, screens, keyboards and so on. All these objects are agents that work to circulate code. They all also need code to operate; code runs systems as well as carries data, and it has its own agency too. (342)
As Rose writes, these complex relationships point to the notion of a new kind of paradigm shift, one that she connects to what Jenkins has described as “convergence culture”:
convergence represents a paradigm shift – a move from medium-specific content towards content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture. (Jenkins, 2008: 254; cited in Rose, 343).
We encourage you to engage further with Rose’s work, as well as the other recommended readings about digital geographies and spatial turns, for a much deeper analysis of how the spatial and digital turns have intersected and produced new shifts together. Digital humanities scholars must be particularly aware of the new kinds of “convergences” between humans and non-humans, digital and material, hardware devices and software codes. After all, these “immersive spatialities” shape not only social life, but the stories we tell about it.