The criti cal stud y of space and place in the humanities, and by implication the study of space and place as a subject of the humanities, is an emerging and maturing field with its own literature. It is over a decade since the term “spatial humanities” appeared in the title of a major publication, The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, edited by David Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor Harris (2010). This was followed by Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History (2014), edited by Ian Gregory and Alistair Geddes, and various special issues and collections, including Deep Mapping (2016), a collection of essays with concerns across the humanities, edited by Les Roberts. More domain- specific collections have emerged as well. In the field of digital literary studies, for example, we can look to David Cooper, Christopher Donaldson, and Patricia Murrieta- Flores’s Literary Mapping in the Digital Age (also 2016). Numerous further examples have appeared over the last few years, of which these are merely representative samples.

These collections reflect a growing interest within the field of digital humanities in space and place. There are many different aspects to this, reflecting the breadth and depth of digital humanities itself. Geospatial information presents a particular type of challenge for analytical, computational, and visualization methods and technology— and for research infrastructures. The reduction of place into a form that a computer can recognize, whether through digital mapping, the creation of digital gazetteers, or the digitization of spatial material, has interpretive challenges that are distinct from (say) the digitization of text into machine- readable form, such as XML mark- up. A distinct set of skills and knowledge beyond “the digital” is required for the digital abstraction of place.