not treating place names and objects the way we should be. just attaching names to geo objects. place is more complex, layers of abstraction on top of that. what is a place, and how does it relate to physical geography?

how do we demarcate and define the work we do, in time and space and cyberspace? what are the theories that we can use that can help us better work with these concepts?

trying to create real tools that can help historian to work with space, visualize relationships, social background, processes like processions... etc.

utility or imperative to adopt or connect with the discourse of the humanities? how might that work, what translation is necessary? long tradition of theorizing space and time in the humanities. how does that complex body of work get taken up, criticized, by the digital humanities?

how do you deal with uncertainty, inconsistency, but still manage to have a distant view on the whole archive, despite this fuzziness?

space time and "placeness," how that connects to sound archives, how to use these archives for social history, to enrich the cultural richness of place, while maintaining the media-specificity as it relates to time and place?

video can potentially make a better connection between planning and social aspects. how to represent relation between platial and spatial history?

what tools do we have, and what questions can we ask that we couldn't ask without them, what predictive power do our models have.

what don't we have a platform for better understanding territories, places, scales and networks... relations among these different layers are extremely complex, need digital tools for managing complexity.

visualization of narrative, how can we consider not only time and space, but also objects and characters?

how to integrate media archives into spatial/placial/temporal analysis. how data and manuscripts from different places can be used in virtual environments.

museum documentation: CIDOC-CRM and the modeling of place and time

geographic information in texts: texts and maps can express different things about geography, modeling document excerpts in a conceptual model, how the information from the texts cannot be expressed as maps.

narrative, esp. fiction, ontologies for describing time and events in narrative, time and space in fiction, where is the fiction/fact boundary and how can that be addressed?

extracting entities from oral histories; how to visualize them spatially and temporally, showing relationships across multiple timelines, identifying triggering or causal relations. how are tools for social sciences combining GIS and statistical tools applicable in the humanities? 

trying to provide a laboratory for mediavel historians to try out different theories about e.g. the movement of kings, addressing problems with placenames

dealing with locations and dates between asia and europe; encoding of place and time is a problem; identification of places over time is problematic

modeling and sharing geohistorical information; understanding experiences of other projects

trying to visualize how to bring together scanned texts, e-texts, research database with bibliography, biographical DB and geographical DB (everything in tibetan)

people working with texts vs. people working with cultural heritage, the latter involves both memory and history (present and past)

environments for working with video, captions and related texts simultaneously. toolbox for working with archives and transcribing audio & video

THEMES

narrative

multimodality, video, etc. split between time/space of what is actually shown vs. what is supposed to be shown (e.g. vancouver and cardiff are filmed so much as "other places" and times)

games as yet another medium which present a different experience of place and time

working with texts as representations of space and time; space and time of text production vs. the space and time created by the text. reading: we read for different purposes, do we accept the author's authority, if we are reading for different purposes, we can't agree on what should be modeled? texts leave out information, describe things at different levels of granularity... however to do comparative analyses, we need some common properties. people want to find historical reality behind mythological stories. nonlinear patterns within texts: hypertextual novel set in london, links among characters are spatial and temporal (e.g. sitting next to people on the tube), 253 by jeff ryman

fuzziness and uncertainty; memories start to fade, looking for inconsistencies or differences among remembered stories ... lots of emphasis on this in humanist theorizing, how can we make demarcations and boundaries. tools require precision or clarity, how do we reconcile that, is there space for recognition of ambiguity? probabilistic theories, fuzzy logic... neatline solution is purely visual (a gradient), but how can you have a debate about that? not just uncertainties and ambiguities but political biases, etc. fuel debate... the logic of the geographical grid and the relationships it defines is not in question? we can be certain of it and put it into geographical databases... if we have that underlying framework we can combine many different perspectives. a contrary view: chronicle may be more important than geography. perhaps Bahktin's chronotope is a more suitable model/framework in that case. spectrum from "pure" fiction to "factual" history, with plenty of stuff in the middle, on one end there are facts but truth is unknown, on the other there are no facts of the matter.

tools for assigning place in a fuzzy way? the modifiable area unit problem: if you name a country, state, locality, neighborhood, places look different at different scales. analogous problem exists for time (Levi-Strauss's levels of history), and also there is the problem of absolute vs. relative times

archeological models and how to represent uncertainty: panorama bubbles (paul bourke), fuzziness (arcadia 2003 or VAST 2005), understanding virtual environments based on what they draw... lifeclipper, swiss augmented reality project that tries to build in fuzziness into its representations

how the brain interprets space and place, need to consider the audience and their perception

definitions of place

once we start defining what place is, we remove information. vagueness is useful in that it carries (potential?) information.

paradox of platial history, place as a proxy for all kinds of cultural difference; yet every individual perceives place in a different way, how to accomodate varying spatial perception, can't assume that places are proxies for things "everyone knows" (see Gulden White, Mental Maps)