Digital mapping offers a host of possibilities for Digital Humanists to visualize many forms of data in a geospatial context. Utilizing digital maps have become an integral part of our everyday lives in the modern world, so it only makes sense that as researches, we should seek to integrate them into how we present our work for the broader public. By arranging data in relation to geography, new trends and themes often reveal themselves in way we wouldn’t expect by simply reading those sources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the ways in which Digital Humanists have chosen to make use of digital mapping is by presenting the order of primary source collection on a map to understand how the data was collected initially. Additionally, geospatial grouping of data can give clues about the relationships between groups or individuals; especially in terms of the language they use and how it relates to regional dialects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Personally, my ideas of how digital mapping can be utilized to bolster user engagement and interaction have changed dramatically after working with Kepler.gl. After mapping the coordinates of interviews with former slaves in the state of Alabama, and arranging them into categories of the type of slave work they performed, I was able to observe a noticeable clustering of former field slaves in the areas around Birmingham and Mobile. Discovery of this type of “born-digital” novel information can lead humanists to new questions they had not considered asking of their data previously <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n