Join us for the first Mellon DH Speaker Series event of the new school year!
Friday, September 18, 2015
12:15-1:15pm
Main Meeting Room
2 S. Main St. in the Old Courthouse
Spatial Humanities: The Final Frontier?
Sarah E. Bond
Department of Classics
University of Iowa
This talk delves into the exploration, application, and utility of the spatial humanities within digital humanities projects both at the University of Iowa and elsewhere in the DH universe. The subfield of spatial humanities often applies geographic information systems (GIS) to data in order to analyze, visualize, and (re)interpret it. However, such an approach presents a number of core questions for both developers and users to answer: How can the use of GIS enhance projects? What tools are out there? Can it help us to pose and answer new questions? How can it work in tandem with other network visualization and data analysis tools? While this talk may not answer each of these questions definitively, it will come very close. In the process, we will look at a number of examples of digital projects focused on the ancient Mediterranean.
Sarah Bond is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Iowa. Professor Bond is a digital humanist and teaches courses on Roman Civilization, Late Antique Latin, Latin historiography, Roman history, and Greek and Latin epigraphy. Her research focuses primarily on Roman law, commerce, marginal peoples, and the formation of voluntary associations during the period called Late Antiquity (200-700 CE). She works extensively with material culture to reconstruct the lives of “ordinary” working Romans (cf. the picture to your right, where she learned about tanning hides), and is currently finishing a book for the University of Michigan Press on unseemly tradesmen in the Roman Mediterranean (45 BCE-565 CE). Professor Bond holds a a B.A. in Classics and History with a Classical Archaeology minor from the University of Virginia and a, M.A. and Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Perhaps most importantly, she was a Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow in Classics and History at Washington and Lee University during the 2011-12 academic year.
This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Dean of the College Cohort Grant.