Why Mapping? Some Lessons from an Art Historian’s DH Ditch

One of the key methodological interventions of Digital Humanities is the capacity to map one’s research data. With the advent of interactive digital maps in the early 2000s, space-oriented humanistic historical research has seen a dramatic growth with multiple visualization tools during the past two decades. As Richard White of now defunct Spatial History emphatically notes in his 2010 working paper, spatial visualization, i.e. mapping, is not a mere illustration to a narrative but “a means of doing research.”

With this reminder and against the backdrop of the history of mapping in digital humanities, at this virtual event Dr. Jinah Kim will discuss the on-going and new research projects that embrace the DH’s mapping capacity at the core of their agenda such as the NEH funded multidisciplinary DH project Mapping Color in History and a new collaborative DH project tentatively titled, Mapping Visual and Material Culture of Monsoon Asia. She hopes to locate the spatial turn enabled by the advent of DH methodologies in the global and material turn in art history and address why mapping matters for humanistic research in the age of climate crisis.

This event is co-sponsored by the Yale Graduate Digital Humanities Colloquium.