The humanities are going through a period of deep change. This is partly due to developments in the society at large, but it also springs from internal changes in our way of thinking and working. The linguistic turn has been succeeded by a spatial turn and the digital is changing the foundations for research as well as for teaching. As humanists we should face these challenges by adapting to the new, to the digital and to the spatial, while keeping focused on traditional scholarly questions of great importance and consequence.
This blog is grounded in the humanities tradition by facing one of the fundamental problems since antiquity, namely, that of representation and of differences between how different media represent reality, fiction, myth, and others parts of the human lived world. It intersects also with the digital by addressing the problem with the help a methodology derived from information technology: computer assisted conceptual modelling. And it acknowledges the spatial turn by pinpointing its research at the boundary between the two main media for representation of geospatial information: texts and maps.
2014-07-03 Øyvind Eide