Spatial Humanities 2024

There are no unknown places
2024-09-25 , MG1/02.05

Identifying places that are referred to in historical sources is an important part of analysing such sources and understanding better the spatial structures they express (Cooper et al. 2016). It is also an interesting area of research in itself, based on a number of assumption that are often not made explicit. In this abstract some of these assumptions are discussed, giving the background for and discussing its possibly counter-intuitive title. We will then go on to discuss some methods for practical place identification, including a small experiment which is under devel- opment. The proposed paper will discuss the results of the experiment connected to the issues raised in this abstract.

Øyvind Eide is a professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Cologne. He holds a PhD in Digital Humanities from King's College London (2013). He was an employee in various positions at The University of Oslo from 1995 to 2013, working on digital humanities and cultural heritage informatics. From 2013 to 2015 he was a Lecturer and research associate at The University of Passau. He was the chair of The European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) from 2016–19 and also actively engaged in several other international organisations including ICOM's International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC). His research interests are focused on transformative digital intermedia studies as a tool for critical engagement with media differences, especially the relationships between texts and maps as media of communication. He is also engaged in theoretical studies of modelling in the humanities as well as beyond.