Activity 01

Humanistic GIS and data in the humanities

What do we mean, exactly, when we talk humanities “data”?

Assigned	Due	Submit
Jan 20, 2026	Jan 27, 2026	Canvas

Introduction & context

The “geospatial humanities” occupies a unique position in the humanities and digital humanities writ large. In this activity, you’re asked to reflect on what constitutes humanistic “data” and sift through some examples of it.

What does it mean to use geographic information systems (or GIS) “humanistically?” Simply prefixing GIS with “humanistic” could imply that there are ways of doing GIS that are not humanistic, human, or humane. If that’s the case, then we should be very careful and thoughtful about how to use GIS in a humanistic fashion—but what exactly does that entail?

Humanistic GIS

For Bo Zhao, a professor of geography at the University of Washington and a scholar of humanistic GIS, this process of doing GIS humanistically requires that we reckon with some pretty big questions: the essence of technology, the essence of place.

In his article on the topic, he draws on phenomological philosophy to argue that human perceptual experience is basically a process of emphasizing some things and de-emphasizing others. We experience the world through a complex process of filtering—a process that is informed by all sorts of factors; cultural, environmental, political, and more—and it’s this fundamental human experience on which Zhao suggests we draw in order to engage in geospatial and geographical inquiry. He suggests abstracting GIS-mediated experiences into its three constitutive parts—human, GIS, and place. With this structure (Zhao 2022, 1581):

… a GIS is approached not in the conventional dualistic manner between human (subject) and place (object) but by the underlying mediating relations. This new structure of mediation embodies an organic whole rather than a simple combination of these three elements. In this sense, humanistic GIS adopts an organismic worldview that transcends the conventional mechanistic worldview.

Okay, that’s kind of dense—but all he’s really saying is:

GIS is not an entity or identity of its own. Rather, it is the product of how it is used and a mirror of its users; its functions can be revealed only when it is being used.

This is a really important point! Thinking about these things can completely structure how you approach GIS as a set of tools. For example:

You could view GIS as a set of objective, scientific, explanatory tools for quantifying and analyzing human experiences
Or you could view GIS as a set of subjective, place-based, context-dependent tools for explicating and enriching those relationships between people and places

Practitioners of humanistic GIS would caution against #1 while encouraging towards #2, but regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of humanistic GIS, the way that you respond these two questions will invariably guide the kinds of maps you make and the nature of their arguments.

The Human-GIS-Place triad

In his article, Zhao (2022) provides a typology of four kinds of relations that humanistic geographic information systems create: GIS as embodiment, GIS as hermeneutics, GIS as autonomy, and GIS as background. Each of these responds differently to the same prompt: how does GIS mediate the experience between people and place? We could depict it, as Zhao does, using this basic equation:

\(Human-GIS-Place\)

Zhao (2022)’s four kinds of relational geographic systems are summarized below:

Table 1: Types of humanistic GIS, after Zhao (2022)

Type	Equation	Description	Example
Embodiment	\(Human-GIS-Place\)	GIS is united with its user	Wearable devices like smart watches
Hermeneutics	\((Human - GIS) \rightarrow Place\)	GIS produces representation of a place	Maps and other cartographic objects
Autonomy	\(Human \rightarrow GIS / Place\)	GIS is independent agent	Geospatial artificial intelligence
Background	\(Human \rightarrow (GIS @ Place)\)	GIS is infrastructure in the world	Air pollution sensors

Note

Before proceeding, read the following:

Skim the “Human-GIS-Place Relation” part of the Zhao (2022) article. You don’t need to read or even understand every word, but take a crack at it. Spend 5-10 minutes, tops
Read in full Miriam Posner’s 2015 article on data in the humanities: Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction

(Humanities) Data Is Plural

Figure 1: Jeremy Singer-Vine’s *Data is Plural* project

Now that you’ve immersed yourself in a bit of geospatial humanities reading, your next task is to apply it to a couple datasets of your choice.

Since 2015, Jeremy Singer-Vine has published Data Is Plural, which he describes as “a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets.” He has archived every newsletter, each of which which contains multiple datasets, for a total of 1,995 datasets so far—a number I can only tell you because he has published a dataset about his dataset, which is to say, a metadata-set. Thanks, Jeremy!

You’ll use Jeremy’s lovely archive as a jumping-off point for this week’s activity.

The activity

Step 1: Poke 👉

Head to the Data Is Plural website and poke around. Look at old datasets, look at new datasets.

Step 2: Pick ✌️

Identify two datasets that strike you as not only interesting, but also relevant to the geospatial humanities. This means that you should choose datasets with some kind of geographic characteristic and some kind of humanities characteristic. (I leave it to you to decide what constitutes either of those characteristics.)

You should download the datasets and open them, or at least try, so you can understand their contents.

Step 3: Write 🪞

Write a reflection of about 300-500 words which details how each of these datasets relate to the “necessary contradiction” that Miriam Posner (2015) describes.

Take care to describe what that “necessary contradiction” actually is, as well as the general composition of each dataset, including:

who made it
how was it made
what it is (e.g., the file type/s)
what it describes (e.g., the fields/properties in the data)
its temporal and geographical extents
what kind of “GIS,” according to Zhao (2022), may have been used to produce each dataset (e.g., background, hermeneutic)—and why you think so

Submission details

Assigned	Due	Submit
Jan 20, 2026	Jan 27, 2026	Canvas

Submit your work as a .doc or .pdf file. No .pages!

References

Miriam Posner. 2015. Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction. https://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/.

Zhao, Bo. 2022. “Humanistic GIS: Toward a Research Agenda.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112 (6): 1576–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.2004875.