Social Knowledge Creation/Spatial Humanities

Spatial Humanities and Digital Mapping primarily focuses on the practices of present day spatial humanities research following the shift to a computational mode of knowledge production and dissemination through digital mapping. This focal shift has resulted in an expanding social element in many branches of the field and often involves working with large corpora made possible through the automatization of geoparsing. One way in which the social element is integrated into the field is through the active participation of users who collect live geospatial data on GPS-based devices and update them onto a map, such as the OpenStreetMap community-driven environment. Another major constituent of digital spatial humanities is the availability of large general and field-specific open gazetteers with geospatial information and other details about the location that vary depending on the gazetteer. Many of these gazetteers consist of thousands of entries and are continuously expanding through user contribution. The open availability of geospatial information circumvents the widespread commercialization of geospatial information and is aligned with open access values. Rather than focusing on digital mapping tools, the entries in this section survey theoretical discourses in the field, features of digital mapping, and successful social mapping initiatives.