What is Spatial History

TLDR: The Spatial History Project at Stanford as discussed by the authors is part of a larger spatial turn in history, but it is not announcing the end of history as you know it or the extinction of the text or the narrative.

Abstract: The Spatial History Project at Stanford is part of a larger spatial turn in history. It is a humble and modest –and expensive-attempt to do history in a different way. I want to emphasize modest and humble. Most so-called “turns” in history emphasize their revolutionary intent. I think that what we are doing is different, but we are not announcing the end of history as you know it or the extinction of the text or the narrative. Historians will continue to write books. Historians will continue to tell stories. The Spatial History Project, however, does operate outside normal historical practice in five ways. First, our projects are collaborative. Many of the things that visitors to our web site see involve collaborations between an historian, graduate students and undergraduates, geographers, GIS and visualization specialists, data base architects, and computer scientists. The scholars involved in the Spatial History Project can write books by themselves, but they cannot do a spatial history project on the scale they desire alone: we lack the knowledge, the craft, and ultimately the time. Second, while many of our presentations involve language and texts, our main focus is on visualizations, and by visualizations I mean something more than maps, charts, or pictures. Third, these visualizations overwhelmingly depend on digital history. By digital