Spatial Humanities is the rubric used increasingly to signify how considerations of space, both geographical and metaphorical, are shaping innovative scholarship in the humanities, especially its sub-genre, spatial history. Typically labeled as “the spatial turn,” this scholarship often relies upon a powerful new technology, Geographic Information Systems, and its disciplinary parent, Geographic Information Science, to raise new questions about the relation of space to human behavior and social, economic, political, and cultural development. It represents a bridging of disciplines, with history, archaeology, literary studies, religious studies, and cultural studies, among others, now taking up theories and approaches formerly the domain of geography and the social sciences.
Its influence and rapid growth can be seen most readily in the large increase in presentations at such interdisciplinary meetings as the Social Science History Association, which has seen the sessions devoted to some part of the spatial humanities grow from one session less than a decade ago to over a dozen in its most recent annual conference. The number of academic courses and programs in GIS as applied to history and the humanities also is expanding quickly in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Spatial humanities and spatial history have emerged from and are being shaped by a convergence of several developments—the spatial turn in the social sciences (notably Geographic Information Science), post-modern theories of space and place, e-Science, Web 2.0, the proliferation of digital literary corpora, and participatory learning/collective intelligence. At first conceived as historical GIS, a sub-field that already has made significant contributions to scholarship, spatial humanities, and its close relative, spatial history, are moving beyond Geographic Information Systems to create a pioneering interdisciplinary scholarship that links empirical and experiential ways of understanding history and culture. It offers an open framework that does not privilege formal academic expertise, yet remains part of the scholarly structure of argument and persuasion. Above all, it integrates knowledge based on concepts of space, time, and place and visualizes them in mapped and beyond-map environments, thus opening the potential for unique deep maps of human experience that allow scholars and others to discover the deep contingencies that influence history and culture. The literature in spatial humanities and spatial history, although emerging, is spare and tends to focus on case studies or methods. The best introduction is David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, eds., The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Indiana University Press, 2010), which is the inaugural voume in a series by the same name. A leading center on spatial humanities is the Virtual Center for Spatial Humanities, a collaboration among Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Florida State University, and West Virginia University.
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