The Institute targets scholars at all stages of their careers who are actively engaged in digitally enabled research and who are currently preparing digital publications and/or teaching courses that rely on geotemporal analysis and argumentation. The Institute is primarily focused on helping scholars bring mature research projects to a state in which they can be submitted to journals and presses for peer review and eventual publication. A large component of the Institute will thus focus on evaluating digital scholarship through conversations with key representatives from university presses, professional associations, and leading journals. The Institute is less an “introduction” to GIS and geospatial digital tools than it is a hands-on opportunity to work closely with faculty and staff affiliated with UCLA’s Digital Cultural Mapping program in order to prepare scholarly research in the geospatial Humanities for peer review and submission to presses and journals. The HyperCities platform (http://hypercities.com), the Scalar platform, and various geo-visualization tools will figure centrally in the Institute.
A critical mandate for these publications concerns the transformation of scholarly practice in the Digital Humanities: They are not intended simply to “discover and display” archival content or make content “available” for others to use; rather they are intended to create new knowledge, new forms of argumentation, and new research methodologies through multimodal argumentation. Institute faculty and staff will facilitate the development of appropriate symbology, navigation patterns, narrative strategies, and visualizations in geo-temporal environments and multidimensional mapping. The faculty co-directors and Institute participants will collaborate directly with the HyperCities technical team, the UCLA Library, and the visiting faculty and editors to develop innovative narrative frameworks for conceiving of and evaluating these publications.