Announcing NewYorkSCAPE, a working group dedicated to exploring the relationship between literature and space in New York City.
- How might spatial practices and concepts suggest new modes of literary inquiry?
- In what ways can digital technologies help us identify and understand intersections between city space and cultural production?
Evoking landscape, streetscape, and cityscape, NewYorkSCAPE explores both lived visual experiences of the city and representations of those experiences in literature, geography, and digital environments. Through skill-based workshops on digital mapping along with presentations and discussion about our learning process and model applications, we will investigate New York City’s literary history in relation to topics such as visuality and the built environment, examine the unique promises and challenges of the spatial humanities, and develop a collaborative project that will define and implement a meaningful digital expression of New York literature and space.
This fall, we will be hosting lab-workshops to develop expertise in spatial mapping and visualization programs, including ArcGIS, Google Earth, Google Sketch-Up, and Neatline, as well as discussion-based events to address the potential of spatial humanities methods for reconceptualizing literary and cultural studies. We hope the group will represent a variety of historical periods and disciplinary approaches. Please consider joining us if any of the following interests you:
- Engaging with projects that investigate the relationship between culture and space in New York City
- Exploring the possibilities of spatial humanities as a research mode
- Experimenting and developing technological skills in a variety of visualization and geo-temporal mapping programs
- Gaining experience in developing digital content
Hi Sally,
Your project is absolutely relevant to our group — we hope to engage individuals from a broad range of humanistic disciplines who share a common interest in the interaction of New York City spaces and forms of cultural expression. Unfortunately, our Nov 6th workshop on ArcGIS filled quickly. I’ll add you to the waiting list, and let you know if a space opens. Can you send us your email address? And I can add you to our mailing list so you’ll be informed of upcoming events and workshops. Hope to meet you soon and learn more about your project.
Kristen Highland
Dear Kristen,
Many thanks for your response and thanks for putting my name on the waiting list. Much appreciated.
Sally Webster
salweb38@gmail.com
I just received an email notice of the workshop sponsored by NewYorkSCAPE scheduled for Nov. 6th. I am very interested in learning more about spatial humanities but before signing up, I wanted to ask if my project would fit with your requirements. Specifically, I am an art historian. not a literary authority, who specializes in public art and am completing a project on America’s first monument (dedicated to the memory of General Richard Montgomery) which, surprisingly, is not in Philadelphia or Boston but on the porch of St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan. My study also encompasses earlier New York monuments that preceeded the Montgomery that were commissioned and placed in the 1760s. For sometime now I have envisioned this project in geograhpic terms, a ‘mapping’ project that would focus on the placement of these monuments in the context of the momentous changes that occured in lower Manhattan in the late 18th century–from the Stamp Act, riots, to the violent removal of the sculpted image of George III from his horse in Bowling Green, to the placement of the Montgomery by Pierre L’Enfant in St. Paul’s to the inauguration of George Washington in Federal Hall.
If this project is of any interest, I would love to attend the workshop and learn more.
Many thanks,
Sally Webster
Professor of American Art, emerita
Lehman College and the Graduate Center CUNY