Reading Assignment - The Potential of Spatial Humanities: Qingyu Cai
In this article, the author mentioned that only in two areas of the humanities - archaeology and history - did scholars begin to apply the new spatial technology and , in the process, discover its limits for their work. However, nowadays, I think more than these two areas have already used GIS as a tool because spatial and time visualization has been widely used in many projects and topics.
For instance, WUSTL’s Hypercities is an open-source, web-based platform for “going back in time” to analyze city spaces’ cultural, urban, and social layers. The studio brings together archival objects, maps, 3D models, academic books and articles, and community histories in an ever-growing, hypermedia context that allows for rich interaction, collaborative authorship, and participatory learning. The GIS is the fundamental tool to bring other materials together and helps visualize them in a unified space and timeline.
Besides, I also had some GIS experience while doing urban design and analysis projects. We usually use the GIS mapping tool to analyze the site’s history and critical spatial features before proposing design ideas. The GIS helps visualize the information directly in space and time dimensions. Besides, the quantitative data sets provided by the GIS help a lot in site analysis for coming up with certain decisive conclusions. For instance, we used GIS to extract land use and building type information to visually analyze the site’s programs, which helped propose which programs we should design. And we can also check the distribution of open spaces, parking lots, and the width of sidewalks.