Språkvetenskapliga fakulteten, LILAe

Kalendarium

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have seen rapid advances in parallel with advancing computer power. GIS can associate any kind of data with geographic locations, sometimes mainly for cartography but also commonly for access to information stored in databases. In academic research, GIS can be used for studies of ecology, archaeology, or public health as well as for literary analysis – any study which associates data of any kind with geographical locations will profit from use of a GIS. Basic principles of GIS include terms such as geocoding, raster/vector, and layers, and basic methods in the design and construction of GIS implementations include elementary coverage of quantitative methods. This lecture will illustrate uses of GIS in the humanities from well-established literary projects. A special feature will be discussion of building a representation, based on GIS layers, of an "iconosphere," a database that attempts to provide different layers of information (e.g., geographical, linguistic, political, cultural) about the circumstances in place at the time of creation for a literary work.