Collaborative Notes for Session (add your own thoughts!)The goal of this roundtable is to bring together a core of people interested in discussing subjective map-making as a productive form of humanistic inquiry. It takes as its starting point some ideas from Bethany Nowviskie’s talk
How to Play with Maps at the Ryerson Space/Place/Play Conference in 2011. Nowviskie identifies personal mapping as an activity that necessarily combines graphesis (drawing as a way of knowing), perspective (conceptual and dimensional) and privileging of individual response. She goes on to describe subjective mapping as reconceptualizing the past on a plane as opposed to within a narrative. With these concepts in mind, this roundtable will create a forum for discussing and sharing knowledge about and experiences of personal, subjective mapping within digital humanities contexts (which might simply be a desire to learn more about what this aspect of spatial analysis is all about). This session is intended as a brainstorming session for detailing the kinds of spaces we want to map that are not well-served by analytic geospatial mapping techniques. Depending on audience interest, the discussion may begin with a brief presentation of the session coordinator’s work mapping and analyzing experiences of visiting Romanian local museums in order to spur discussion. The overarching goals of this session will be: 1) to identify and connect a core group interested in sharing information about this topic; 2) to learn more about what digital tools (analytic GIS and others) people are using and abusing to create subjective maps; and 3) to exchange ideas about ways forward along this pathway within the “spatial turn” in the humanities.
