"Loosening the Grid: Ideas for Mapping Human Experience " by Anne Kelly Knowles and Levi Westerveld

Anne Kelly Knowles (University of Maine) and Levi Westerveld (Norwegian Coastal Authority & Arctic Permafrost Atlas) co-present "Loosening the Grid: Ideas for Mapping Human Experience," the keynote address for Institute for Historical Studies' research theme of 2023-2024, "Experiencing Place: Interrogating Spatial Dimensions of the Human Past."
GIS has become the tool of choice for making maps of many kinds, yet it's underlying architecture and design defaults are poorly suited to mapping the qualities and uncertainties of experience. Knowles and Westerveld will explain how Holocaust survivor testimonies pushed them to find alternatives to coordinate geography, and how their current work builds on their first experiments with topological mapping.
Anne Kelly Knowles has been a leading figure in the Digital and Spatial Humanities, particularly in the methodologies of Historical GIS, for more than twenty years. She has written or edited five books, including Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008); Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (2013); and Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). Anne’s pioneering work with historical GIS has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including the American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship (Smithsonian magazine, 2012), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and three successive Digital Humanities Advancement grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2016-2022). She is a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, an international group of historians and geographers who explore the spatial aspects of the Holocaust through digital scholarship. She is currently developing a public website to share data on over 2,200 Holocaust camps and ghettos and nearly 1,000 survivor testimonies to enable students and scholars to map the historical geographies of named and unnamed Holocaust places.
Levi Westerveld is a geographer and award-winning cartographer with broad experience in spatial data gathering, analysis and visualization. He has 8 years of work experience in GIS and mapping for environmental modeling, impact assessments, community engagement and communication. Levi has international project management experience overseeing multidisciplinary teams with delivery in the Arctic and Pacific, and thematic knowledge in land and marine environmental issues, including climate change, waste and biodiversity. He is the lead editor of the forthcoming Arctic Permafrost Atlas. He is currently employed as senior engineer in the section for digitalization and innovation at the Norwegian Coastal Authority.
Event details: liberalarts.ut...