Spatial Humanities: The Final Frontier?

Sarah E. BondUniversity of IowaSarah-Bond@uiowa.edu

Augustodunum as visualized by the Pelagios Project’s Peripleo. Tiles by AWMC-UNC (CC)

“In [the school’s] porticoes let the young men see and examine daily every land and all the seas and whatever cities, peoples, nations, our most invincible rulers either restore by affection or conquer by valor or restrain by fear. Since for the purpose of instructing the youth, to have them learn more clearly with their eyes what they comprehend less readily by their ears…” (trans. Talbert).

Plates from the Atlas van de Oudchristelijke Wereld, translated into the Atlas of the Early Christian World (1958) and edited by Christine

Mohrmann and Frédéric van der Meer. These are pictures rather than scans, because the ANS did not have a

scanner large enough.

University of Iowa Classics graduate students Adrienne Rose and Jeremy Swist attempt to put the Barrington Atlas into their pockets. Note: They

cannot fit it in their pockets.

(L) Richard Talbert with his tome (R) Tom Elliott with map and requisite sweater vest (Lower)

awmc.unc.edu

Pleiades.stoa.org

Syriaca.org

Interactive map of Syriac toponyms in The Syriac Gazetteer on Syriaca.org. Note the ability to view various layers (e.g., dioceses, synagogues) based off of an Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW-NYU) Leaflet map. (Screenshot: January 18, 2015).

Recogito screenshot of the places named in the 6th c. CE grammarian Stephanus of Byzantium’s Ethnica.

Rule #1 of DH Club is… Open Access, Linked, and Transparent Data are Best.

Take a click and explore the various projects engaged in by digital humanists at the University of Iowa.

Staley’s model of the Nabataean temple at Khirbet et-Tannur, located in Wadi Hasa atop Jebel Tannur.

Node of early modern publication relationships for 1600 CE visualized by “Shakeosphere.”

Paul Dilley and Sarah E. Bond Ryan HorneUniversity of Iowa University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill

*Please note the catchy acronym!

BAM (“Big Ancient Mediterranean”)* bam.lib.uiowa.edu

Elijah Meeks (formerly of the Stanford Orbis project, but now studying your binge watching data at Netflix) explains topic modeling.

The Collegium Project

Main interface: http://servo.cs.wlu.edu/Collegium/#/

Allegorical depiction of Roma from the Tabula Peutingeriana (Diocletianic Date).

“As mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world, maps are fundamental tools helping the human mind make sense of its universe at various scales...maps have impinged upon the life, thought, and imagination of most civilizations that are known through either archaeological or written records.”

--J. Brian Harley, “The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography,” in The history of Cartography. Vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. Brian Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1.