This short article summarises a preliminary study of the poetry and correspondence of the English poet Norman Nicholson (1914-1987), undertaken as part of Lancaster University’s Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places project. In addition to offering a concise explanation of the Spatial Humanities project and the methods it employs, the article explains how working with GIS, visualisation techniques, and distant reading enriches our understanding both of the geography of Nicholson’s poetry and of the spatial dimensions of the network of people with whom he exchanged letters throughout his career.

This book is about the relationship between the practice of mapping, the application of geospatial technologies and the interpretation of literary texts. The contributors have been selected from a range of disciplines and they approach this relationship from different perspectives. Yet, notwithstanding these differences, their contributions are collectively defined by a shared preoccupation with the possibilities afforded – and the problems presented – by the use of digital mapping tools and techniques in literary studies and cultural-geographical research. Each of the following chapters, that is to say, explores the dynamic ways that the creation of literary maps can confirm meaning and challenge critical assumptions.

This chapter will introduce the basics of geographical information systems (GIS) for humanities scholarship. It will provide a brief overview of how using GIS software can help researchers understand the geographies within their sources. It will briefly introduce how GIS models features and places on the Earth’s surface so that the reader is gets a basic understanding of the core terminology associated with GIS. It will then talk through the basics of how a researcher gets their sources into GIS software; how they can query, integrate and analyse data within GIS; and how they can disseminate their results using maps and electronic outputs such as KML files that can be disseminated using Google Earth. The conclusion will look briefly at what a researcher can and cannot expect to gain from using GIS and stress that mapping is only a part of the research process – good at identifying and describing patterns but limited in its ability to explain them. The chapter will be include several diagrams and will be extensively referenced.

The spatial humanities constitute a rapidly developing research field that has the potential to create a step-change in the ways in which the humanities deal with geography and geographical information. As yet, however, research in the spatial humanities is only just beginning to deliver the applied contributions to knowledge that will prove its significance. Demonstrating the potential of innovations in technical fields is, almost always, a lengthy process, as it takes time to create the required datasets and to design and implement appropriate techniques for engaging with the information those datasets contain. Beyond this, there is the need to define appropriate research questions and to set parameters for interpreting findings, both of which can involve prolonged discussion and debate. The spatial humanities are still in early phases of this process. Accordingly, the purpose of this special issue is to showcase a set of exemplary studies and research projects that not only demonstrate the field's potential to contribute to knowledge across a range of humanities disciplines, but also to suggest pathways for future research.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have become widely accepted in historical research and there are increasing calls for them to be used more widely in humanities disciplines. The difficulty is, however, that GIS comes from a quantitative, social science paradigm that is frequently not well suited to the kinds of sources that are widely used in the humanities. The challenge for GIS, if it is to become a widely used tool within the humanities, is thus two-fold. First, approaches need to be developed that allow humanities sources to be exploited within a data model that is usable by GIS. Second, and more importantly, researchers need to demonstrate that by adopting GIS they can make significant new and substantive contributions to knowledge across humanities disciplines. This paper explores both of these questions focussing primarily on examples from literary studies, in the form of representations of the English Lake District and history, looking at nineteenth century public health reports.