Some Questions Raised in Discussion

Our first open discussion during the first day of the workshop, following a round of lightning talks by the workshop participants, raised a series of great questions which we hope to follow up on Tuesday. Among these were the following:

• As historians, to what degree should we set aside time to acquire the skills and knowledge in some of the tools and methodologies that might enable us to engage with social network analysis and geographic analysis literature? How can we encourage the “hybrid” roles in projects involving mapping, visualisation, or large data components.
• When we create maps or visualisations in our work, what are the most effective means for tracking change over time in the objects/subjects we study?
• How do we encode ambiguity in our visualisations?
• What are some of the most effective ways to balance the quantitative and qualitative approaches as well as scales between micro and macro (the local and the global) in our projects?
• On the issue of scales again, how do we confront the challenges of making diverse sources, and diverse scales of source material comparable?
• What are some of the challenges and best practices in bridging and defining the disciplinary boundaries in historical work of a spatial nature or with strong computative or visualisation components?
• We have seen time and time again that assembling data and cleaning data are extremely labour intensive and highly underappreciated. How do gain recognition for this labour, and incorporate the costing and scheduling of it in the design of our projects and grant applications?
• How to we generate more open-ended research questions – with mapping, space and visualisation in mind?
• Lately we have seen PhDs and post-docs in Digital Humanities emerge (example here with KCL). Is that the way forward? Shouldn’t we let the ‘DH’ label fade away and make sure everyone is “DH-ready”?
• What are maps and visualisations? Are they part of our “narrative” and thus analysis? Are they an “archive”?
• Do maps and visualisations replace narrative or rather enhance our written narrative? What is the relation between text and image in our histories?