A workshop sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities

Call for Papers

February 20-21, 2009

The digital revolution has made massive amounts of historical and social science data available to scholars in electronic formats, and this phenomenon is opening new possibilities for exploring the human past. The ability to plot historical processes embedded in these datasets using mapping and visualization tools holds remarkable promise for providing scholars new insights into old questions. Yet significant obstacles currently prevent scholars from sharing their geospatial data with one another, and thus from full taking advantage of the potential of visualization techniques.

To address this, scholars and practitioners from multiple disciplines (geography, history, geographic information science, computer science, graphic arts, etc.) are invited to submit proposals for presentations at a two-day workshop (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities) that will focus on two main issues:

How can we harness emerging cyberinfrastructure tools and interoperability standards to visualize, analyze, and better understand historical events and processes as they spread out across both time and space?

How can user-friendly tools or web sites be created to allow scholars and researchers to animate spatial and temporal data housed on different systems across the Internet?

We seek 2-3 page proposals for 20-30 minute presentations that describe ongoing projects, address these questions, and outline a view for future research and experimentation. We invite proposals from all backgrounds, and relevant topics might include: historical GIS applications, cartographic animation, analyzing and visualizing temporal data, service oriented architecture, web-mapping and interoperability standards, data and metadata standards, open-source and commercial applications.

The workshop will center on in-depth discussions among 10-20 participants in roundtable format. The first day will be devoted to individual presentations; the second day to discussions about the workshop's main questions, and describing what should be the future of this work. Travel scholarships will be available to invited participants.

For more information or to submit your proposals, contact the conference organizers at:

Proposals are due December 15, 2008 via email to the conference organizers, and invitations for participation will be sent out by December 31, 2008. The workshop will be held at the University of Richmond, February 20-21, 2009.

Funding provided by NEH Digital Humanities Level I Start-Up Grant