5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities

Workshop Theme

Scholars in the humanities have long paid attention to spatial theory and cartographic outputs, joining in the ‘spatial turn’ of the 2000s. Since then, new technologies and methods have led to the emergence of a field that is now commonly known as the Spatial Humanities. This field is constantly evolving and is looking to address questions related to space and place and is posing very interesting challenges including, for example, the identification and analysis of real, vague, and imaginary space in textual corpora. Within the field, different theoretical and methodological approaches are being now explored and used, including GIS, Deep Mapping, Computer Vision, and Qualitative Spatial Representation among others. In the past, methods from the standard toolset of geographic information systems (e.g., computation of viewsheds and zones of influence, least-cost path analysis, mass-preserving areal weighting and dasymetric mapping, terrain classification according to land coverage or land use, different types of thematic cartography techniques, etc.) have been successfully employed to analyze the geographies of human cultures, both past and present, looking to solve research questions posed by humanities-based fields. However, many challenges persist in the application of more recent technical developments in the geographical information sciences, which have been showcased in venues such as ACM SIGSPATIAL (e.g., high performance computing methods for analyzing increasingly larger datasets, machine learning methods for developing and tuning models making use of multiple sources of auxiliary data, the use of volunteered geographical information to complement traditional data sources, or methods from the geo-spatial semantic web to ease interoperability across datasets and services).