Tuesday Panel: Integrating Space and Place in GIScience: Examples, Challenges and Opportunities

Clio Andris is an assistant professor of geography at Penn State University and director of the Friendly Cities Lab. At Penn State, she is an associate of the Institute for CyberScience, a faculty member in the Social Data Analytics program, and an affiliate of the Population Research Institute. Her research is on social networks, social flows and representing personal relationships in GIS. She was formerly a postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. She holds a PhD in Urban Information Systems from MIT where she was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow.

Karl Grossner is Technical Director of the NEH-funded World-Historical Gazetteer project based at the University of Pittsburgh’s World History Center, a linked open data system with global scope. Karl has a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2010). His basic research in GIScience has focused on several aspects of “computing place” for historical research, including semantic modeling, representations of temporality, and the uncertainty inherent in historical data. Throughout his academic career, Karl has sought to bring encourage dialog and collaboration between GIScientists and humanities scholars. In 2014, he and Katherine Hart co-founded the GeoHumanities SIG of the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) towards that aim.

Yingjie Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo (UB) and the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). His major research area is in geographic information science (GIScience), and more specifically in spatial, temporal, and textual data analytics, geospatial semantics, and geographic information retrieval. He develops and integrates spatial analysis methods, natural language processing, machine learning and deep learning techniques to discover a variety of knowledge from data for supporting disaster response, urban planning, and other applications. He received his PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara.

Wednesday Panel: Building a Bridge to the Humanities with GIScience

Edward Ayers has worked in the digital humanities since the inception of the field.  For the last decade he has worked with the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond as co-editor of American Panorama: A Digital Atlas of United States History. He has been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and won the Bancroft Prize in American history.  Ayers is one of the cohosts for BackStory, a popular podcast about American history. His newest book, The Thin Light of Freedom:  The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, received the Lincoln Prize. He is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond.  

Katherine Hart is the Head of the Geography and Map Division's Reading Room at the Library of Congress. She obtained her MLIS from Louisiana State University and has spent her career focused primarily on access to and use of maps and geographic information in academic libraries.  She is past Chair of the American Library Association's Map and Geographic Information Round Table and received that group's Honors Award.  She co-edited the Journal of Map and Geography Libraries.  Along with Karl Grossner, Kathy co-founded the GeoHumanities SIG within the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, a group which fosters communication and collaboration among humanists working with geographic information.  

Robert T. Tally Jr. is the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Texas State University. His books include Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019), Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectic Criticism (2014), Spatiality (2013), Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013), and, as editor, Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017), Literary Cartographies (2014), and Geocritical Explorations (2011). The translator of Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism (2011), Tally is also the general editor of “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,” a Palgrave Macmillan book series.