5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities

Will be held in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021 in Beijing, China

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).

Following the success of previous editions in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, this workshop concerns with the use of geographic information systems and other spatial technologies in humanities research, placing an emphasis on new methodologies that leverage the aforementioned technical developments. The standard tools from geographic information systems, as well as more advanced methods such as text- and image-based geographical analysis or spatial simulation, can all benefit from innovative approaches leveraging machine learning, parallel and/or distributed computation, semantic technologies, etc. on humanities sources like archival manuscripts, maps, encyclopedias, newspapers, correspondence collections and more. These kinds of documents pose new challenges for identifying and analyzing spatial information. The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from different sub-fields of computer science and the geographical information sciences interested in the application of spatial methods and technology to the humanities to discuss how to address these issues in ways that generate new knowledge in multiple disciplines. Participants will demonstrate their contributions and explore how modern GIS and other technologies can inform, and be inspired by, the digital humanities.

Call for Papers

2017 Edition2018 Edition2019 Edition2020 Edition

Organizers

Ludovic Moncla

Ludovic Moncla

INSA Lyon.

Carmen Brando

Carmen Brando

EHESS Paris.

Katherine McDonough

Katherine McDonough

The Alan Turing Institute

Important Dates

Submission Deadline

September 3, 2021.

September 13, 2021.

Deadline for Reviewers

September 22, 2021.

October 3, 2021.

Acceptance Decisions

September 24, 2021.

October 5, 2021.

Camera Ready Versions

October 4, 2021.

October 13, 2021.

Workshop

2nd November, 2021.