Digital mapping for the humanities

Date and time

Friday 13 September 2019 10am - 4pm

Digital mapping for the humanities

Part of the Digital Research in Action workshop series.

Download Dr Katrina Grant’s slides from this workshop.

Digital mapping is one of the most popular methodologies for working in the digital humanities. It is being used across a range of disciplines from art history, archaeology, literature, social and political history, archives, museums. Any project or collection that has some kind of place-based aspect to it can often benefit from a range of digital mapping approaches, even if you have never worked directly with maps or geographical methods. This workshop will offer suggestions for working with ‘messy’ humanities data, and suggest ways to manage the uncertainty and fragmentary nature of many of the sources we work with in the humanities. This workshop will demonstrate how digital mapping can be useful both as a practice-led research method and as an output for your research. It will demonstrate a range of ways to get started with digital mapping using open source web-based apps.

The workshop will be hands on and a chance to experiment with different methods. The workshop will be a scaffolded introduction to georeferencing, methods for mapping data, and, methods for extracting geodata from messy humanities sources (texts, old maps, images).

You will need a laptop, tools and software will be web-based. Examples and data sets will be provided but participants are encouraged to bring any historical maps (digitised), place-based data, and sources from their own research as these may be incorporated into the hands on activities.

Dr Katrina Grant
Dr Katrina Grant

Presenter

Dr Katrina Grant (@orientalhotel)
Centre for Digital Humanities Research, ANU

Katrina Grant is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Centre for Digital Humanities Research. Trained as an art historian, she now works across a range of projects that engage computational methods and digital tools to extend humanities research. This includes a digital mapping project looking at climate change in seventeenth-century Italy, the development of digital educational resources for the National Museum of Australia, and, 3D modelling of archaeological bone collections for research and outreach, to name a few. She teaches digital humanities methods and project design to undergrads, masters and PhD students at the ANU.

Image: Screen shot from Digital Mapping the Roman Campagna