AAAS 380G
Digital Humanities
Spatial Narrative and Mapping Difference
- Institution
- Binghamton University
- Taught
- Fall 2025
Description
This hybrid seminar-studio course examines how digital platforms and tools such as ArcGIS can enrich diaspora and Asian American Studies while speaking to broader inquiries into race, ethnicity, and culture. Students will explore digital maps and spatial storytelling, and how they uncover structures of exclusion, resilience, and belonging.
During the first three weeks, students will engage with foundational scholarship in Digital Humanities and critical cartography; the next three weeks will be devoted to analyzing existing GIS projects (eg. Bending Lines, A Journal of the Plague Year, Densho’s Sites of Shame, the Virtual Asian American Artists Museum), and exemplary student work. The course concludes with a Workshop/studio segment in which students build technical fluency. Hands-on ArcGIS workshops will cover topics such as database design, thematic mapping, and interactive web-map creation. Working in teams, students undertake original digital-mapping projects that explore questions of representation, power, erasure, and resilience within diaspora context. Projects may include, but are not limited to, mapping transnational circuits of Asian American migration linking New York City enclaves to ancestral homes; charting communal memories of Binghamton neighborhoods alongside oral-history archives; tracing vernacular heritage landscapes across multiple diasporic communities; or visualizing the geographic distribution of Binghamton’s ethnic food culture. Major assignments include one group presentation during the seminar weeks and a final group digital-mapping project that demonstrates students’ ability to utilize DH methods in investigating narrative power, representation, and the politics embedded in everyday cartographic choices.