My experience of the DH@Guelph Summer 2017 Workshops was intensive in depth of information and the rate at which we absorbed it. Over the course of 4 days we covered the basics of ArcGIS, the primary software used for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and mapping. The class was still small, around eleven students including myself, and the research librarians, Quin Shirk-Luckett and Teresa Lewitsky who were leading the course. Although some of the other workshops were even smaller, our size still enabled us to learn from each other and brainstorm ways to use ArcGIS in pursuit of research. We were a diverse group, including professors, post-doctoral students, graduate students, and myself as the only undergraduate student. The majority were focused in history and art history, although some worked within film studies and English literature. My studies have primarily been centred in film studies and foreign languages, so the different approaches to integrating GIS caused me to reconsider some of my potential uses for it.
The broad spectrum of ways that GIS can used across disciplines became evident on the first day when everyone introduced their research and proposed use of GIS for it. One of the goals of the workshop was learning how to extract data from primary and secondary historical sources, and to compile data tables for the software to read. As an exercise in extracting historical data, my partner and I examined the City of Guelph’s 1960s fire insurance records, provided by the Guelph Public Library. These maps were incredibly detailed, including an extensive legend denoting building materials, preventative measures such as indoor fire sprinklers and outside fire hydrants, geographic landmarks and more. After analyzing the types of data, we had to think of table categories that would be best for the program to understand the inputted data.
We dedicated a full day to tutorials of various functions of ArcGIS, specifically those that were fundamental to creating a map from scratch. Some of my classmates had experience with mapping and ArcGIS, but we soon reached a point of equal footing and everyone doing their best to keep up with the class. ArcGIS is not an intuitive program, and it was very important that all steps had been followed without any misstep. We received highly detailed instruction booklets for each function, which were useful as a reference when someone fell behind, and will surely be helpful when I revisit the program for my project. These were custom-made by the instructors which ensured that they were the most up-to-date instructions.
The next day we took a much-needed break from the computer lab in the University of Guelph’s Aboretum, a 410-acre natural space devoted to specialized garden and botanical collections. It played host to our exercise of interpreting geographic data from literature, with my partner and I using A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh story: In Which Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded By Water. Our original aim was to upload the coordinates captured by our GPS device to ArcGIS, but we ended up having to manually input them. Vectorizing the maps into points, lines, and polygon features allows the map to be more easily understood and analyzed, and was luckily the most user-friendly feature of ArcGIS.
I took this workshop in preparation for independent research, so I unfortunately could not take advantage of the opportunity to work on our personal projects under the guidance of our instructors. With no independent data, I chose to further complete the map based on our geographic interpretation of the Hundred Acre Wood from Winnie the Pooh. I georeferenced the original map used to guide our coordinates in the Arboretum with the new map we created. This allows a more accurate comparison between interpretations of the story and its geography. At the end, we discussed open-source alternatives to ArcGIS, other mapping projects such as the Indigenous storytelling platform wikiupedia that utilizes real-world locations using GIS and augmented reality (AR), and storymaps, online interactive maps that can host narratives and are highly customizable.
If I had known beforehand, I would have made sure to have some of my own data to work with while I had the dedicated attention of experts. I also would have done more preliminary research on the capabilities and range of GIS projects, in order to have better examples to discuss during class and to be able to compare with what I was learning. I am also more aware of research librarians, who have both broad and deep knowledge, and are often an under-utilized resource. One of the most beneficial aspects of the workshop were my classmates. While I’m still deciding how to structure my research, hearing about their proposed theses, and styles and methods of research revealed how much potential I have to experiment with. Ultimately, my time at the DH@Guelph workshops excited me to use the skills I have gained in my own work, and for the future of digital humanities.