Spatial Humanities: The Final Frontier

This talk delves into the exploration, application, and utility of the spatial humanities within digital humanities projects both at the University of Iowa and elsewhere in the DH universe. The subfield of spatial humanities often applies geographic information systems (GIS) to data in order to analyze, visualize, and (re)interpret it. However, such an approach presents a number of core questions for both developers and users to answer: How can the use of GIS enhance projects? What tools are out there? Can it help us to pose and answer new questions? How can it work in tandem with other network visualization and data analysis tools? In order to try and answer some of these questions, we will look at a number of examples of digital projects focused on the ancient Mediterranean and beyond at UI.

Sarah Bond is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Iowa. She is a digital humanist and teaches courses on Roman Civilization, Late Antique Latin, Latin historiography, Roman history, and Greek and Latin epigraphy. Her research focuses primarily on Roman law, geography, marginal peoples, and the formation of voluntary associations during the period called Late Antiquity (200-700 CE). She works extensively with material culture to reconstruct the lives of “ordinary” working Romans. She has a forthcoming book for the University of Michigan Press on unseemly tradesmen in the Roman Mediterranean (45 BCE-565 CE), and is both an associate editor for Pleiades.stoa.org and a PI for the BAM project. Professor Bond holds a a B.A. in Classics and History with a Classical Archaeology minor from the University of Virginia, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.