Geohumanities and Spatial Narratives
Summary
Geohumanities represents an interdisciplinary convergence of humanistic inquiry and spatial analysis, examining how cultural, social and emotional dimensions of place are constructed, interpreted and communicated. Central to this field are spatial narratives—accounts that use mapping, geovisualisation and digital tools to trace the interplay of people, environments and stories across time and space. Through methods such as deep mapping, historical GIS and story-mapping, researchers surface layered meanings embedded in landscapes, from urban form and community memory to migration routes and heritage sites. Advances in computational techniques—natural language processing, network analysis and spatial interpolation—have enriched the capacity to extract and visualise narratives from textual archives, oral histories and quantitative data. This has fostered novel applications, including community co-design of green infrastructure, cartographies of emotional experience and networked representations of social ties. By blending critical theory, cartographic practice and digital innovation, geohumanities and spatial narratives offer robust frameworks for understanding place-based identities, informing policy and engaging diverse publics in the stewardship of cultural and environmental resources.
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Geohumanities and Spatial Narratives publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in geohumanities and spatial narratives across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Story map: An interactive digital narrative that combines maps with text, images and multimedia to convey layered accounts of place.
Deep mapping: A methodology that integrates historical, cultural and sensory data to produce richly textured representations of place.
Historical GIS: A specialised geographic information system designed to analyse and visualise past geographies and spatial relationships.
Spatial social network: A model that represents social ties or structures as nodes and edges within a geographic framework.
Spatial interpolation: A statistical technique for estimating values at unsampled locations based on surrounding measured data points.
References
- From unstructured texts to semantic story maps. International Journal of Digital Earth (2023).
- Spatial social networks for the humanities: A visualization and analytical model. Transactions in GIS (2022).
- Mapping Green Dublin: Co-Creating a Greener Future With Local Communities. Urban Planning (2021).
- A spatial model for the representation of emotional landscapes. Transactions in GIS (2024).
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