Spatial Research
Ours is the “epoch of space” — Michel Foucault
Since the dawn of history, people have been busy with the question where. Where to dwell, where to hunt, where to grow food, where to grow, where to go, where to live. Where is everything? Where is the edge of the world? Where does it begin? Where are they? And they? Where is this? Where is God? Where are we? Where am I? Where is everybody? Cave drawings and cuneiform tablets, biblical texts and Roman histories, charts of seafarers and Google Maps – all attempt to grasp the spaces of the world, put all things in place and order all places of things. An honorable endeavor, no doubt, yet one deemed to remain never wholly fulfilled.
We constantly create new places and alter existing ones. We build and change structures, streets, cities and transform deserts, forests and seas. We divert river courses, melt icebergs, modify the air. We create and abandon homes, organizations, businesses, virtual worlds. We invent and break apart empires, kingdoms, states, districts. The spatial world is ever changing.
Physical space, however, is only one part of space. Places have social meanings. We create places by naming them and contextualizing them within cultural webs of meanings. We tell, retell, and develop stories that become an essential part of places. Sometimes, different places can exist simultaneously in the same location with different names and separate social contexts.
My own home place, Israel/Palestine and Jerusalem, is one of the most famous examples of such a social and cultural spatial contestation. Our place is not their place. But my place is also not your place, neither is her place, and none of the three is his place.
The best way to define the concept of place, one geographer once wrote, is as a crossroads of memories. A place is also the sum of all varied individual experiences attached to it. The spatial world is shattered into billions of distinct personal places. They too change constantly. Just as a person never bathes in the same river twice, a person does not visit the same place twice. A perfect map of the world is probably unachievable.
The Spatial Studio is a virtual space aiming to use the exactitude of scholarship and cartography to explore the open-endedness of places. Visitors are invited to explore. Scholars and businesses are invited to collaborate at every stage of spatial research—from a question to a cartographical product for publication. Scholars are welcome to explore a research process through the following stations: Digital research infrastructure, Geodata visualization, and Designed maps.
An example of scholarly collaboration — British antiquarianism and the Levant
Dr. Zoe Beenstock studies British literature and antiquarianism in the eighteenth century and Romantic period. She turned to me for assistance with the project “A New Sacred Geography: British Antiquarianism and the Colonial Remaking of the Levant, 1750–1830.” The project asks how the Levant was perceived in British minds during the period preceding Britain’s direct involvement.
To address this question, Zoe had assembled a database of references to the Levant in British journals. She wanted to explore spatial references in her corpus but could not rely on commercial LLMs alone to turn a haystack of data into valuable insights. Over a few weeks of collaboration, we developed a process that combined machine assistance with scholarly review.
Follow the project from building infrastructure, through visualizing geodata, to producing maps that showcase its arguments.