Geoparsing, GIS, and Textual Analysis: Current Developments in Spatial Humanities Research

TLDR

The spatial humanities are a nascent, rapidly growing field that promises to transform how humanities scholars engage with geography, yet progress is slow due to the need for new datasets, techniques, and well‑defined research questions. This special issue seeks to showcase exemplary studies that demonstrate the field’s potential and outline pathways for future research. It achieves this by applying exploratory spatial techniques to a range of humanities texts—letters, literature, and reports—to reveal new geographic insights.

Abstract

The spatial humanities constitute a rapidly developing research field that has the potential to create a step-change in the ways in which the humanities deal with geography and geographical information. As yet, however, research in the spatial humanities is only just beginning to deliver the applied contributions to knowledge that will prove its significance. Demonstrating the potential of innovations in technical fields is, almost always, a lengthy process, as it takes time to create the required datasets and to design and implement appropriate techniques for engaging with the information those datasets contain. Beyond this, there is the need to define appropriate research questions and to set parameters for interpreting findings, both of which can involve prolonged discussion and debate. The spatial humanities are still in early phases of this process. Accordingly, the purpose of this special issue is to showcase a set of exemplary studies and research projects that not only demonstrate the field's potential to contribute to knowledge across a range of humanities disciplines, but also to suggest pathways for future research. Our ambition is both to demonstrate how the application of exploratory techniques in the spatial humanities offers new insights about the geographies embedded in a diverse range of texts (including letters, works of literature, and official reports) and, at the same time, to encourage other scholars to integrate these techniques in their research.