Iain Stewart(b. 1964-) is a Scottish geologist, television and radio presenter, as well as a professor of Geoscience Communication at the University of Plymouth. I have just finished watching his epic 5 part series How Earth Made Us.1 I am twenty years older than Stewart, am a retired teacher and lecturer, now poet and publisher and currently am the secretary of the Baha’i Group of George Town Tasmania, the oldest town in Australia, the oldest continent.
Professor Stewart’s line of thought reminded me of Ellsworth Huntington’s intellectual mission “to determine step by step the process by which geological structure, topographic form and the present and past nature of climate have shaped man’s progress, moulded his history, and thus played an incalculable part in the development of a system of thought which could scarcely have arisen under any other physical circumstances.”2 Stewart presents a focus on how the environment has shaped history.
While this series was presented on Australian television the Plains Humanities Alliance held a public panel presentation entitled “Changing Places: The Geographic Turn in the Digital Humanities.”3 Sometimes called humanities computing this field has focused on the digitization and analysis of materials relating to the traditional humanities disciplines. Digital Humanities currently incorporates digitized materials from the traditional arts and humanities disciplines, such as: history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies. It then combines the methodologies of these disciplines with tools provided by computing such as: data visualisation, data retrieval, computational analysis, digital publishing, and the electronic publication fields.
Also relevant to this discussion is geographic information system or geospatial information system(GIS). This is a system that captures, stores, analyses, manages and presents data with reference to geographic location data. It is a critical tool in facilitating a new wave of spatial analysis. In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis and database technology. GIS may be used in archaeology, geography, cartography, remote sensing, land surveying, public utility management, natural resource management, precision agriculture, photogrammetry, urban planning, emergency management, landscape architecture, navigation, aerial video and localized search engines.
GIS allows users to create multiple layers of information that can be aligned on the same map or spatial field. Historical maps can be scanned and geo-referenced, that is, stretched to fit the current map, thus allowing users to combine and overlay various forms of information in order to understand how they relate to one another. -Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC1 TV, 8 March 2011 to 5 April 2011, 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., 2 Ellsworth Huntington, Wikipedia, Aaron Hofer, Geographic Determinism Through the Ages, and “Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?” Jared Diamond, 3Office of University Communications University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Tooling Up for Digital Humanities.
I think it quite logical, Ellsworth,
that there is a step-by-step process
by which geologic structure, forms
topographic, & the present and past
climate have shaped progress, moulded
our history, thus playing an incalculable
part in the development of systems of
thought which could scarcely have arisen
under any other physical circumstances.1
I think it quite logical, Samuel,2 that the primary
source of conflict in our post-Cold War world is
and will be the cultural and religious identities as
you formulated in your 1992 lecture at the AEI:
American Enterprise Institute.2 And so Professor
Stewart, I can agree with your thesis, in part, and
I did enjoy your series on TV in this Australian
autumn: delightful, Ian, absolutely delightful!!*
1 Ellsworth Huntington(1876-1947) was professor of geology at Yale and known for his studies on climatic determinism.
2 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.
Ron Price
19 April 2011
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