CLS0125 Introduction to Geospatial Humanities

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Final projects

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Student teaching ([ca. 1900-1925])

Students may choose to exhibit their work at Tufts’ GIS Expo day on May 8 for 25 points (2.5% of overall grade) of extra credit.

Introduction and context

The final project is an opportunity to collect, process, analyze, and visualize spatial data of your own choosing. Using ArcGIS Pro, you’ll choose a topic and elaborate it in four registers: its topical register, its conceptual register, its technical register, and its graphical register. Each of these are explained in detail below.

Spread across about seven weeks of work, your final product will culminate in a large-format infographic (e.g., a poster) or an online interactive StoryMap that describes the research question, data, and methods as well as the analysis and the results.

*gets on soapbox*

I am biased against StoryMaps. I think they’re a deeply hit-or-miss format for cartographic communication. More importantly, I think you – the student – will learn more about cartography and geographic storytelling by making a poster. The constraints of a printed page can be incredibly generative, but ultimately, the choice is up to you, and I won’t hold it against you (or your grade!) if you choose to make a StoryMap.

*steps off soapbox*

Examples of previous student projects can be found at Tufts GIS Expo Explorer. Try searching for terms like history when you thumb through the portal. Lots of these projects won’t be relevant to “geospatial humanities,” but some are.

The four registers

Topical register

The topical register of your project is the empirical content. Maybe you’re interested in housing discrimination in the early twentieth century United States; maybe you want to explore changing place names in Asia Minor; or maybe you want to study representations of space and place in The Odyssey.

All of these would suffice as excellent starting points for a final project topic. Of course, your actual project will need to investigate something a bit more specific.

Once you have a sense of your general topic, you want to proceed towards a spatial research question. It should be more nuanced and complex than simply plotting points on a map. A sufficient final project topic must elaborate a spatial research question, in many cases proceeding from a hypothesis, and in all cases making an argument. All maps, after all, are arguments.

Maybe this goes without saying, but: your final project needs to deal, in some way, with geospatial humanities. You can interpret this flexibly. The project need not be historical in nature, but it should have something to do with the humanities as a set of disciplines; e.g., language, architecture, archaeology, literature, music, cinema, history, debate, classical texts, and so on. If you have an idea that you aren’t sure will count as “geospatial humanities,” email me (Ian) as soon as possible so we can discuss it.

Conceptual register

The conceptual register of your project is what hooks the empirical content into a theoretical framework. What is your theory of housing, home, and discrimination? What can we learn from changing place names in Asia Minor? Why does it matter to view places from The Odyssey on a map?

In other words, the conceptual register is the “so what” of your project. You should be able to explain why this matters to study, and more importantly, situate it within a wider intellectual history.

You don’t need to write a full-blown literature review, but you will need to submit a short “environmental scan,” which will sort of work like a literature review, but is meant to be less intimidating.

Technical register

The technical register refers to how you made the map. What datasets did you use? Vector, raster, or both? How much should we trust the data and your analysis of it? Did you make the data yourself, or did you find it somewhere? What kinds of tools and workflows did you use? Why did you select those ones?

Put another way, the technical register is your methodology, and it should be explicitly described in your final product.

Graphical register

Maybe this one’s obvious, but the graphical register refers to how you choose to display your final product. Your project should follow best practices of cartographic design, whether carefully followed or artfully broken. Design should always be in service of your overall argument – keep this in mind each step of the way as you lay out your final map.

To lay out your map, use

Key dates and deliverables

Topic proposal

  1. Activity due 3/26
  2. ~750 words (no less than 500, no more than 1,000) + a wireframe
    1. 250 words on topical register
    2. 250 words on conceptual register
    3. 250 words on technical register
  3. A wireframe mockup of how your final will look. This term is typically used to describe websites or interactive maps, but it applies perfectly well to infographics or StoryMaps. You could sketch this by hand, lay out in PowerPoint/Publisher/Illustrator — whatever you want, but I recommend Publisher.
  4. Should include at least…
    1. 1 possible primary source resource (e.g., historical map, dataset, text) for your topical register
    2. 1 possible secondary source resource (e.g., scholarly essay, article, book) for your conceptual register
    3. 1 possible methodology resource (e.g., an existing geospatial analysis) for your technical register

Environmental scan

  1. Activity due 4/9
  2. ~750 words (no less than 500, no more than 1,000)
  3. Describe key takeaways from at least 6 resources and how they relate to your chosen topic and project, including:
    1. At least 2 spatial datasets (must be GIS-friendly; e.g., csv, shp) you plan to use in your analysis (e.g., census data, historical maps)
    2. At least 1 dataset you plan to create during the workflow (e.g., a derivative kernel density raster, a spatially joined vector file, data digitized from historical maps)
    3. At least 1 primary source resource (other than the datasets listed above – e.g., a photo/drawing/letter that helps enrich the story you’re trying to tell)
    4. At least 1 secondary source resource
    5. At least 1 methodological resource—this one is really important! It could be an academic article, a post on StackExchange, or an ArcGIS Pro tutorial. Whatever it is, it should inform your analysis.

Draft map

  1. Assignment due 4/23
  2. Reiterating, this is an assignment
  3. Like all assignments, it’s worth 75 points and should be a nicely-designed map that conveys some part of your analysis and the data you’ve created/worked with so far
  4. It need not be your entire poster, which will probably contain multiple inset maps, small multiples, etc.
  5. Your draft map should clearly demonstrate your progress towards the analysis
  6. You should submit:
    1. A draft map in PNG format at 300 DPI
    2. A short description – no more than 200 words – of where your analysis stands, what’s left to do, etc.

Final project

  1. Due 5/7 at 11:59pm
  2. You must submit either a 30”x40” poster, laid out following the instructions on Canvas, or an ArcGIS StoryMap
  3. Both of these submission types must contain three main components: text, maps, and graphics
  4. Text must include:
    1. Discussion of your main spatial research question/s & themes
    2. Discussion of methodology/ies & workflow
    3. Discussion of findings/observations
    4. Discussion of limitations
    5. Discussion of data sources
  5. Maps must include:
    1. A primary map that shows key parts of your analysis. As part of creating this map, you should have created
    2. Though it’s not required, I imagine you’ll need more than one map
    3. Refer to past posters in the Expo Explorer, as well as our list of “class favorites,” for inspiration
  6. Graphics must include:
    1. 1-2 non-cartographic summaries of the data you used
    2. Doesn’t need to be super fancy—you could make this using Microsoft Excel/Google Sheets
    3. Bar chart, scatter plot, even as simple as a summary table

GIS expo

If you plan to participate in the Expo, your poster must be printed—with help from data lab assistants—by 5/8.