Overview

Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS is a scholarly monography that uses the ArcGIS toolkit to better understand and interpret literary, historical, and philosophical texts. The author uses GIS as an electronic stylus, digital cuneiform, and electronic paintbrush to visualize literary language, landscapes, space, and concepts using symbols, images and colors, with a special focus on examples from Irish literature and history. Such a model resurrects the practice of geographia from its ancient Greek and Roman roots, when the discipline constituted a literary genre more so than a branch of physical science. By applying the science of GIS, scholars in the humanities and associated disciplines can creatively play and experiment with its toolkits to create helpful visualizations that support and illustrate their critical analysis of humanities texts. In Abstract Machine, Michel de Certeau s Map Theater provides a metaphor to reflect upon the possibilities of reconfiguring GIS for disciplines in the humanities and to view its operations as an interpretive tool rather than an embodiment of complete knowledge. As we peer into the digital proscenium of the computer screen, a visual perspective established in the Renaissance focuses our gaze, like that of a theatre patron. In this perspective, GIS stories constitute codescapes of computer language and commands. GIS visualizes a geographical syntax and scripts its operations a la Shakespeare like lines in a Cartesian wordplay to survey, navigate, and imagine various story-paths through space and time. Abstract Machine discusses and offers a few creative examples from Irish history and literature to inspire further geospatial encounters in the terrae incognitaes of the broader arts and humanities.

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9781322639543

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Charles Travis is a senior research fellow with the Trinity Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin, where he holds a PhD in geography. He develops methodologies and applications for humanities geographical information systems (HGIS) and conducts research in the digital and environmental humanities and in human and literary geography. He edited the volume, History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections (2012), with Alexander von Lunen; and published the monograph Literary Landscapes of Ireland: Geographies of Irish Stories, 1929-1946 (2009). He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the digital humanities at Trinity College and has held teaching posts at Trinity College, the University of South Florida, and several other universities.

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