'Spatial Narrative' talk to address mapping challenges

Anne Knowles, professor of geography at Middlebury College, will give a talk titled "Spatial Narrative: The Challenge of Mapping Experience" on  Thurday, April 9, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in Norlin Library in the British Studies Room on the fifth floor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This talk is part of the "Exploring Digital Humanities" lecture series, which tackles topics on research and pedagogy.

Maps have become a popular medium for telling stories, whether stories of historical events in textbooks and scholarly websites or narratives of individuals’ experiences in popular books and blogs, observers say.

Knowles will discuss the conceptual limits of spatial narrative as revealed in the Holocaust Geographies project.

Knowles’ intensely visual presentation will explore how modes of representation can imply, and deny, certain perspectives on the Holocaust. She will also suggest non-digital methods for improving the historical sensitivity and geographical expressiveness of spatial history.

Knowles is known for her innovative work in geography. Her research has made use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in a variety of contexts ranging from mapping the Holocaust to exploring the Battle of Gettysburg to analyzing Pennsylvania’s iron industry.

Her books include, most recently, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and the edited volume Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship (ESRI Press, 2008).

In 2012, she received the Smithsonian's American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship.

For more info on the Digital Humanities Speaker Series, see: http://www.colorado.edu/history/dhss/

April 2, 2015