Les Roberts

Deep Mapping Les Roberts

In recent years there has been much discussion of the impacts of a "spatial turn" in arts and humanities disciplines. The more far-reaching these impacts have become, the broader the scope of what a more "spatially inflected" humanities might, and indeed does, look like. Yet, while the breadth of scholarship to which we can attach the provisional label "spatial humanities" has, not surprisingly, foregrounded issues of space and place, questions of time and temporality equally underpin theoretical and practical interventions that are advancing research in this area. The idea of "deep mapping", which, as a term, has its origins in the writings of William Least Heat-Moon (but as an idea, "deep mapping" has a much broader --and deeper --provenance), is one that finds resonance across spatial humanities research more generally. While not necessarily couched in such terms, deep mapping speaks to a rich profusion of perspectives that are, in some shape or form, engaged with the mapping or tapping of a layered and multifaceted sense of place, narrative, history, and memory. From qualitative GIS, to developments in literary or cinematic geography, site-specific and performance art practices, or work on cultural memory and the characterization of place, to approaches that fall under a more generic form of "psychogeography", deep mapping encompasses a loose set of orientations and practices that give fuller expression to what we have come to understand as "spatial humanities".