As a scholar of early modern literature, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the way that digital tools can help us to understand historical topographies – places that no longer exist, voyages long since completed, or cities that blend the ruins of the past with monuments to the present. And within the humanities, there’s a burgeoning interest in digital spaces. For instance, take a look at:
- The Map of Early Modern London. Here, the English capital is reimagined as a hyperlinked environment, with historical facts and literary references embedded in popular destinations.
- @BenJonsonsWalk. In 1618, the poet and playwright Ben Jonson spent four months walking from London to Edinburgh to win a bet. After a manuscript recounting the trip was rediscovered in 2009, this Twitter feed reproduced the walk in real time. [Update: it looks as though the Twitter feed has just been suspended, but you can learn more about the project here.]
- The British Library’s Georeferencing Project. Through crowdsourcing, thousands of historical maps have been linked to geographical locations.
Given these developments, I’d like to propose a session where we discuss digital mapping – techniques for doing it and the relative strengths and weaknesses of it for our work. How can digital tools help us to map historical and fictional landscapes in our research, our teaching, our archives, and our libraries? What does it mean to organize information or data spatially? And how does the digital realm, as a space unto itself, inform the work that we do?
