Stakes and Challenges of Spatial Humanities: a diagrammatic approach

Abstract

This paper aims to offer a schematic and articulated vision of the main questions and concepts that delimit the broad and diffuse field of Spatial Humanities, characterized by its transdisciplinary nature. We start from the idea of visual thinking and we adopt then a diagrammatic approach in order to give an example of how visualization methods can help to tackle theoretical problems and see clear when it comes to complex issues. In particular, we use the graphic format called Venn diagram, which enables to give spatial form to those challenges and stakes mentioned above. It does so by placing (spatializing) concepts inside the diagram circles and their intersections.

Considering first four main axes or circles (reading wars, (un)mappability, graphesis and geovisuality), we deal with overlapping areas of two (scalar reading. Humanistic GIS, infographic turn, spatial turn) and three circles (cartographic writing, networks, maps in literature, cognitive mapping). Finally, in the core of the diagram we find the idea of literary texts as thick maps requiring a transdisciplinar approach. The kind of approach provided precisely by geography, map studies, cognitive studies, visualization studies and literary theory.