New World Ordering

With the exception of a few exemplary projects, geospatial information technology has played a surprisingly a small role in humanities scholarship, given the importance of space and place to historical and literary understanding. However, the ubiquity of easy mapping interfaces and handheld devices is now bringing GIS to the attention of researchers beyond science, architecture, and engineering. The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library is developing a new technical infrastructure and discovery mechanism to aggregate and visually layer terabytes of its own geospatial data with open-access information on the Web. But can we design a system to meet the special interpretive requirements of the humanities? How can we serve disciplines for which subjectivity inflects results, and ambiguous or contradictory evidence necessarily shapes every map?