Weeks 1-5 – Data and Human Space

Week 1 From Lying Maps to New Forms of Knowledge?

1 (Tu 27 Aug) Introduction to the course (syllabus, location, methodologies, course drive)

2 (Th 29 Aug)

Read:

Prunel-Joyeux, “Do Maps Lie?” Artl@s 2.2(2013)

Bliss, Yes, Maps Can Lie, but not like this (Citylab)

O’Beirne, What Happened to Google maps? | Google Maps vs Apple | What is OSM?

Watch: Geospatial Revolution Episodes 1-4
Listen: BBC 4 “The Digital Human: Maps” (starts 1:20)

Discussion: Paper maps vs digital maps. What are maps anymore? Geospatial Data: New Knowledge or New Forms of Surveillance? Can we opt out from the geospatial revolution?

Week 2 Mapping Technologies from the 20th to the 21st century

3 (Tu 3 Sept) On early spatial technologies and military intelligence

Watch:

Data for Decision (Canada Film Board) 1967.
Microfix, early GIS, c 1985
“GPS will be the next big thing” (1992)
“Early 1990s GPS”
Read: “On Maps and Mapping Technologies in the Persian Gulf War” (Clarke)

Compare map journalism then with now:

1993 maps from book about the Gulf War
Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek
A Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election
What Can We Tell from Billions of Food Purchases?

4 (Th 5 Sept) Mapping and the Digital, Spatial Humanities

“Those Hurricane Maps Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean” (Cairo/Schlossberg)

Explore some spatial humanities sample projects:

Digital Harlem / Virtual Harlem (mentioned in the Jones’ article)
Mapping the Lake District: A Literary GIS
Panorama: An Atlas of US History
Mapping the Mahjar | blog | archival source

Read: Jones, “Places” The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, ch 4

Discussion: What different kinds of maps are made here? What are the sources of information? How do you think the data was harvested?

Week 3 Course Infrastructure

5 (Tu 10 Sept) Hands on: Introduction to ArcGIS Online (with Taylor)

6 (Th 12 Sept) Hands on: Introduction to Zotero (with Beth)

Week 4 Web Hosting and Exploring Spatial Projects

7 (Tu 17 Sept) Introduction to Web Hosting and Managing your own domain

Browse: A Brief History of Domain of One’s Own Part 1, Part 2
World Economic Forum, Digital Citizenship, Creativity and Entrepreneurship

Discussion: What does it mean to have a “domain of one’s own”? to control {yourname}.com? What would you want to be the first search results to be when someone googles your name? If you could shape your own digital identity instead of letting other third-party services do it for you, what identity would you shape?

Some instructions for preparing for class:

Once you have received confirmation of the creation of your web hosting account, you will chose the name for your domain {yourname}.hosting.nyu.edu you can sign in here and create your own domain. Remember no spaces or special characters or upper case.

From the dashboard, try to download WordPress from the (most common) Applications at the top of CPanel. Select “dhs” for this class (remember shorter URL’s are always better). Choose an administrator username and password and write these down for safe keeping!

Try to configure your WordPress when you are done and publish some basic content. If you would like to watch some videos from LinkedIn Learning (formerly lynda.com) has many about wordpress (choosing a theme, customization). We will have much more of a chance to work with WordPress together, just try it out for now.

Blog 1: What are the elements of a spatial perspective that have interested you the most so far in the class? Refer back to the videos, reading or class conversations in your answer, citing them in your blog as you can. (due 22 Sept) Check out the rubric for blog postings here.

8 (Th 19 Sept)

Exploring Spatial Humanities Projects Student presentations

Today you will present in groups (of two persons, listed below), and you will choose two of the three projects listed below. For your presentation, please plan on talking for 5-6 minutes maximum total about the projects your choose. I have split up the projects simply by going down the class roster. Be in touch with your partner before Monday, gather your thoughts, decide who will present, or how you will divide up the presentation. We will pass around the cable to present on your computer.

You might think about the following questions for preparing your short presentation:

How do the projects represent research about space? What are the data contained in them? Where did they come from? How are those data “brought to life”? Do the projects “make an argument”? If so, what do you think that is? Is some special contextual knowledge needed to understand the projects? How many people worked on the projects? How long did they take? Are they finished? How transparent are the projects about goals, challenges? How might the maps represented be said to be “lies”? How might they be said to create new knowledge?

Group 1 Las Calles de las Chicas (in Spanish and English)| Interactive Ibn Jubayr| Legacies of Labor | Exchanges on Hamdan Street

Group 2 London Chatty Map | Slave Revolt in Jamaica| Cartillas indigenas (in Spanish only) | Mapping Marronage

Group 4 Stories of the Susquehanna |Photogrammar | Street Poetry (In English and Italian) | Finding Tovaangar

Group 5 NYC Space/Time | Going to the Show | Queering the Map | Mapping Absence| Trail of Blood

Group 6 Mapping Dante | Torn Apart/Separados |Linguistic Landscapes of Beirut | Textual Geographies

Group 7 Mapping Paintings | Tenement Housing in Rio|Geography of the Post | MapLesotho

Group 8 Labour Antisemitism | Mapping the Destruction of TN’s African-American Neighborhoods | Mapping Emotions in Victorian London | Mapping Shakespeare’s Plays

PS: For future reference, many more can be found here and here.

Sun 22 Sept 1000-1115 (C2 339) Optional project ideation session #1 Bring your laptop and let’s work on your web hosting and getting your WordPress to look good. You can bring text for Blog 1 or work on ArcGIS online.

Week 5

9 (Tu 24 Sept) Introduction to StoryMaps (with Taylor) We can work here with the partial dataset provided here. Compare the work of the NCSU group.

10 (Th 26 Sept) Introducing the Collective Project: Building a Granular Model of Immigrant Migration to the New York City area using two archival documents. Jupyter notebooks here.

We will go back to Mapping the Mahjar | blog | archival source and to this additional resource.