xuf3/geog595

Digital GeoHumanities

GEOGRAPHY 595 A: Digital GeoHumanities

Meeting: Wednesdays, 2:30 - 5:20, SMI 109

Instructor: Bo Zhao, SMI 416B, Office hours by appointment

Contact: 206.685.3846, [email protected], jakobzhao (skype/wechat)

In this seminar, we will invite you to participate in the ongoing discussion and scholarly practice at the intersection of geospatial technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. Digital GeoHumanities refers to the systematic use of digital geographical resources in the humanities, as well as the geospatial analyses and narratives of their application. This seminar provides a unique opportunity to hone practical skills of geospatial technologies and to catalyze critical thinking of their applications. You will read literature from a few well-established geographers and philosophers in STS (Science, technology and society), as well as the latest pieces of work by both GIS (Geographic Information Science) and critical scholars. With the theoretical preparation, you will practice a few emerging data-driven techniques (e.g., web crawling, GitHub, geo-narrative, deep learning, text mining, virtual reality, raspberry pi, blockchain, etc.), and also reflect upon their relevance to critical views, such as power relation, hermeneutics, embodiment, autonomy, surveillance, and so on. As a course requirement, you need to choose a topic from any humanities discipline, apply the newly learned visual, analytical, and synthetical skills, and also critique the significant role, mediating function, or social implication of the geospatial technologies. The course material is strongly influenced by my interest in mapping, GIS, humanities, and STS. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Dr. Bo Zhao. Welcome to this course, we are delighted to have you with us!

This page is the syllabus for the course — there is no printed syllabus, just refer here instead. Please refer to this document often! Please also do feel free to ask for clarifications whenever needed.

📆 Weekly Schedule

Download the reading material of each week from a shared folder at UW Google Drive.

Week 1: Foundation

• Readings: GeoHumanities, Phenomenology, Humanistic Geography.

• Statement of Intent: requirements Due: 01/10 5:00pm

Week 2: CyberGIS

• Readings:
  • Technology, Power and Geographic Knowledge;
  • CyberGIS, CloudGIS and Spatial Cyber-Infrastructure
• Thinkpiece Due: 01/14 5:00pm.
• Practical Exercise 1: Cloud-based project management using GitHub Due: 01/19 5:00pm.

Week 3 & 4: Bot

• Readings: Autonomy, Robot and Web crawler
• Thinkpiece Due: 01/21 5:00pm.
• Practical Exercise 2: Twitter data collection using web crawler Due: 02/02 5:00pm.

Week 5: Spatial Database

• Readings: Uncertainty, Post-truth and location spoofing
• Thinkpiece Due: 02/04 5:00pm.
• Practical Exercise 3: Spatial database management using SpatiaLite Due: 02/09 5:00pm.

Week 6: GeoVisualization

• Readings:
  • Hermeneutics, Inductive visualization
  • Geo-narrative, web mapping, storymap
• Thinkpiece Due: 02/11 5:00pm.
• Practical Exercise 4: Making a storymap using Mapbox Due: 02/16 5:00pm.

Week 7: GeoAI

• Readings:
  • Place and space
  • GeoAI, Placial analysis and place recognition
• Thinkpiece Due: 02/23 5:00pm.
• TBA Practical Exercise 5: Place context analysis using machine learning Due: 01/07 5:00pm.

Week 8: Virtual Reality

• Readings:
  • Embodiment and Cyborg
  • Virtual Reality, Point-cloud visualization and SfM (Structure-from-Motion)
• Thinkpiece Due: 02/25 5:00pm.
• TBA Practical Exercise 6: Making a web-based VR environment Due: 03/01 5:00pm.

Week 9: Internet of Things

• Readings:
  • Surveillance, Resistance and Panopticism
  • Real-time GIS, Open Hardware
• Thinkpiece Due: 03/03 5:00pm.
• TBA Practical Exercise 7: Environmental data collection with Raspberry Pi. Due: 03/08 5:00pm. However, this exercise will not be included to your final score.

Week 10: Summary, Presentation, and Writing Project

• Each student presents the writing project during the last class meeting (03/11/2020).
• Writing Project Due: 03/16 5:00pm.

🔔 Course Requirement

Computational skill: This course welcomes students who own some GIS or other computational experience, and have programmed in a python or javascript IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Students should at least hear of GIS, GitHub, Leaflet, web crawler, and Raspberry Pi before considering this seminar, and most importantly, be self-motivated to solve a research question with the listed computational skills.

Statement of intent: Please prepare a short statement of intent describing your project on or before the end of Week 1. Please feel free to plan your writing project to help advance progress in your own work – qualifying exam essay, draft of journal article, side project, etc. I am happy to meet with you to talk more about your writing project.

GitHub: This course material will be hosted on GitHub instead of UW Canvas. On this dedicated GitHub repository for this course, you can find most of the course material, participate in group discussions by submitting GitHub issues, and creating new GitHub repositories to turn in practical exercise deliverables. By the end of this quarter, you will be more proficient in operating a cloud-based coding environment and able to host your work online as a way to gain public and peer attentions.

Seminar leadership: You will take at least two turns facilitating our seminar exercise and discussion with a few of your classmates. You will work with one or more others (depending on the enrollment) on this, so you are not responsible for the entire session yourself. Please work together to prepare some activities and guiding questions that will inspire and structure our discussion of the material. The instructor is happy to help you to prepare the practical exercise walk-through before the meeting class.

Practical exercise: You need to get familiar with the practical exercise instruction before the class meeting in order to better reflect upon the theoretical concepts. We will walk through each practical exercise in class, and you will submit the deliverables to GitHub three days after the class meeting (you will have one more ### Week for your ### Week 3&4’s exercise deliverable).

Participation in seminar discussion: Complete all assigned readings and get familiar with the practical exercise instructions before class meetings, and participating in critical discussions of those readings.

Thinkpiece: Each Week (except for Week one and weeks where you lead discussion), please prepare a one-paragraph ‘thinkpiece,’ discussing your reflection to three general items:

• (at least) one of the readings for that week;

• The relevance of the practical exercise with the readings; and

• The relevance with your writing project.

Please upload your think piece to the GitHub issues page by Tuesday 5:00 PM – so your colleagues leading discussion can draw on your ideas in planning activities for our class session.

Writing project: During the quarter, you will complete a larger writing project that engages with the seminar material and course themes, along with additional readings that you bring into conversation with the assigned course readings. You are aiming for 20-30 pages coalescing around ideas and readings from this quarter – you can take up and extend one of the themes from our weekly structure or develop a new one relevant to your own work and thinking. Writing projects is due no later than the end of Week 11.

✔️ Grading

Based on the above requirements - 40% seminar participation, think pieces, and discussion leadership, 20% practical exercise, 40% writing project.

💌 Accommodations

We welcome the opportunity to work with any students with disabilities in this class to ensure equal access to the course. If you have a letter from Disability Resources for Students (DRS) outlining your academic accommodations, please present the letter to me (or email us, to confirm, if the letter is electronic) as soon as possible so that we can discuss the accommodations you may need for this class. Any discussions between student and professor need to occur as early as possible in order for adequate arrangements to be made. If you do not yet have a letter from DRS, but would like to request academic accommodations due to a disability, please contact DRS here (Links to an external site.), or in-person at 011 Mary Gates Hall, or at 206-543-8924 (Voice & Relay), [email protected].

Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form.

© 2019-2020 All rights are reserved by Bo Zhao.