Environmental Scan

Employing digital mapping and topic modeling methods in a humanities research context provides an opportunity to explore data spatially and discursively. These methods are a stable presence in the digital humanities toolkit; in addition to the scholarship using these tools and methods, there is a body of literature in which they are critically examined.

Digital Mapping

Digital humanities mapping projects have been extensively used to discover and present spatialized histories, literary studies, and more. Andrew Robichaud’s “Animal City” project maps the movement of butchers out of San Francisco’s Butchertown and into marginal areas of the city in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. His digital map depicts the spatial distribution of animal industries in the city as well as the impact of zoning laws on these industries. The “Animal City” maps were supported by Stanford’s Spatial History Project in the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, which hosts custom maps that illuminated spatially inflected histories. Another project from the Spatial History Project, “Prostitution in Philadelphia: Arrests 1912-1918,” is a map by Hammel, et al. that makes use of point data, hotspots, and faceting in order to examine the spatialization of the criminalization of sex work during this period.

Other mapping projects use the affordances of the platforms to depict movement and affect in a way that critically engages with the static, seemingly-objective state of the map object. The “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761” map by Vincent Brown portrays the history of a slave revolt via animated movement through space and time, depicting the path of the officials who were suppressing the rebellion. As Brown writes, “the written record skews our understanding toward the insights, fears, hopes, and desires of slaveholders…Tracing their locations over time, it is possible to discern some of their strategic aims and to observe the tactical dynamics of slave insurrection and counter-revolt” (Brown, 2012). Cooper and Gregory’s “Mapping the English Lake District: A Literary GIS” points towards modes of affective mapping in the domain of literature, and D’Ignazio’s case study of the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute illustrates the ways in which traditional mapping of data points such as car accidents can become a critical geographic practice when the data collection and mapping is community-based. In her article arguing for a movement to feminist geospatial technologies and practices, Mei-Po Kwan writes that “embodied” geospatial practices, such as narrative GIS projects, will be “attentive to the effects of emotions, which mediate the social and political processes through which our subjectivities are reproduced” (2007, p. 23).

Topic Modeling

Conversations around topic modeling within the humanities are grounded in a critical application of the method, as well as its relationship to traditional humanities research (Blei, 2012). That is, “[t]he results of the topic modeling help to uncover evidence already in the text; it is the researcher’s responsibility to analyze and interpret the results (Brett, 2012). Critiques of topic modeling center around the potential for misuse when the tools become so user-friendly that the user does not need to understand or interact with the algorithm (Schmidt, 2012). Trevor Owens cautions that knowing the underlying algorithm is necessary for using the results as evidence rather than for "generative discovery" (2012), and Ted Underwood’s commitment to teaching humanists to understand how the algorithm is operating speaks to this need as well (2012). Prominent topic modeling research includes Cameron Blevins’ “Topic Modeling Martha Ballards Diary,” which models twenty-seven years of Ballard’s diary entries, and Robert K. Nelson’s “Mining the Dispatch,” in which he topic models the Richmond Daily Dispatch to uncover Civil War-era discourses. Nelson writes of the “classificatory power” of topic modeling at the corpus—rather than document—level. Similarly, Schmidt draws on Blei to describe Latent Direchlet Allocation as “information retrieval,” akin to tags or subject headings in a library catalog (2012).

Theoretical Foundations

The field of critical geography has developed out of David Harvey’s work establishing the deep connections between space, capital, and power (1985, 1994, 2001). Critical animal geographers have taken up this theoretical foundation to develop analyses of human-animal relationships, such as the ways in which the commodification of animals requires particular and culturally-specific spatializations (Neo and Emel, 2017) and how the spatialization of animals produces and reproduces certain social relations (Gillespie and Collard, 2015).

Foucault’s framework for understanding how discourse “transmits and produces power” (1978, p. 101) is useful for developing a more localized understanding of the social relations at work within a particular space.

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