Rebecca K. Schindler is a professor of Classical Studies at DePauw University where she teaches courses on Classical Archaeology and Greek and Latin Literature. Her research interests include the use of spatial technologies in archaeology, particularly GIS. She has been the co-PI of the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology and its corresponding database: Mediterranean Archaeology GIS (soon to be a part of the Fasti Online). She is currently the scientific director of the Lago Trasimeno Archaeological Project.
This is the source
Over a decade ago, the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean (CGMA) was created with two stated goals: (1) to create an on-line GIS inventory of survey projects in the greater Mediterranean and Europe and (2) to introduce advanced undergraduates to GIS concepts through Mediterranean archaeology. Through a specialized GIS course a small group of advanced undergraduate students learned how to interpret map data, create effective maps, and build map hypothesis - skills that are recognized as necessary for enhancing spatial thinking and thus spatial literacy. In the last decade GIS technologically has changed dramatically. The advent of Geospatial Semantic Web (Web 2.0) now makes it possible to integrate spatial thinking concepts at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. This paper argues that spatial literacy must be more intentionally integrated into the Classical Studies curriculum and illustrates how we have begun to do that at DePauw University.
Integrating spatial literarcy into undergraduate Classical Studies curricula
Over a decade ago my colleague Pedar W. Foss and I initiated the Collaboratory for GIS and
Mediterranean Archaeology (CGMA).
Competence in spatial literacy is now widely recognized as a necessary skill for
college graduates seeking employment in a wide range of industries. From
specific training in GIS&T to more general competence in logistics and
marketing, students with a background in spatial studies are more competitive on
the job market without explicit attention to [spatial literacy], we
cannot meet our responsibility for equipping the next generation of
students for life and work in the twenty-first century
the competent and confident use of maps, mapping, and
spatial thinking to address ideas, situations, and problems within daily
life, society, and the world around us
the ability to visualize and interpret location,
distance, direction, relationships, change, and movement over
space
Place, space, and time are concepts integral to analysis in Classical Studies. Our discipline has always employed spatial technologies in our teaching and research, from analog map sequences in textbooks depicting the shifting landscapes and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean to archaeological phase plans of individual sites. Classicists and archaeologists were early adopters of digital technologies for organizing, visualizing, and analyzing spatial data. In the last decade open-source, web-based resources have been developed by Classicists to address specific research questions. Several of these projects were presented at
When it comes to teaching spatial technologies and spatial thinking to
undergraduates, Classical Studies is now somewhat behind the curve. Courses on
GIS in Classics and Classical Archaeology are rare (although they are
increasingly part of the graduate curriculum in archaeology). Not surprisingly,
much of the momentum to increase spatial literacy in higher education has been
motivated from the Geosciences, and to a lesser extent the Social Sciences
Despite those challenges, for some of us, integrating spatial thinking skills
into our courses may become a matter of survival for the Classical Studies
Curriculum as well as the Humanities at large. As the Humanities are generally
losing ground in higher education, we must continue to make the case for our
relevance within the larger curriculum. Bryan Alexander and Rebecca Frost Davis
argue that, at a time when the academic humanities seems otherwise
threatened and contracting, the digital humanities remains a viable
growth area, even a potential source of salvation for threatened
disciplines.
At DePauw University, we are now building off the success of the CGMA project,
which included a high-end
GIS course, by developing low-end
mapping and visualization exercises into our general education courses.high-end
and low-end
can be read as both
technological and financial. High-end
assignments necessitate
expertise that not all instructors have acquired and both the software and
hardware require resources not available on every college campus. On the
other hand, low-end
assignments take advantage of free technologies
with a less significant learning curve.skills
we impart to our students. Critical
thinking, reading, and writing are no longer sufficient; we now need to be
incorporating the intentional teaching of the spatial thinking skills that are
necessary for a wide range of careers.
The advent of the Geospatial Semantic Web (Web 2.0), which allows users to
access, produce, and share map data through sites such as Google Maps and
applications like Google Earth, makes it possible to integrate spatial thinking
concepts at various levels of the curriculum. Our students use this technology
everyday, from mapping directions on their smart phones to geo-tagging their
photos on Instagram. Teaching spatial concepts in a hands-on manner is no longer
limited by hardware and software requirements. Any classroom with a computer and
an Internet connection can access an array of resources useful for teaching.
Sinton and Schultz high end
and a low end
approach to
teaching GIS and spatial literacy in the Classical Studies curriculum at DePauw
University.
Over the last two decades, graduate programs in Classical Archaeology have begun to offer courses, or at least training, on the use of GIS in Archaeology. At the undergraduate level, however, such opportunities are less common. Students may get some field training in GIS, if they happen to participate in an archaeological field project utilizing GIS, or they may elect to take a GIS course in a Geoscience department. Yet, GIS training has not only become expected for graduate work in Classical Archaeology, GIS concepts (i.e., the fundamentals of spatial literacy) are necessary for success in a wide range of careers. With this in mind, Pedar W. Foss and I, along with colleagues at three other undergraduate institutions, designed the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology (CGMA) to provide archaeological research opportunities to undergraduates and develop a discipline specific undergraduate course in GIS.
On the research side, we constructed a web-based, platform-independent, GIS for Mediterranean wide survey archaeology. Mediterranean Archaeology GIS (MAGIS) was released in 2007 and continues to operate. On the teaching side, undergraduate students were involved with the project through a seminar class, grants and internships to work on MAGIS, and participation in the meetings with the CGMS advisory board. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the seminar class. Further information on how we built MAGIS and the involvement of the students can be found on the project website.
The CGMA seminar was designed to be taught over the Internet synchronously
between the four participating institutions. The course has been taught every
two to three years since 2003, with a longer hiatus between 2010 and
2014.
The heart of the CGMA course is the practicum, a semester-long GIS research project that is designed and implemented by the students on each campus. The work is divided into five stages from formulating questions to database design to collection to implementation to reporting of results (see sample syllabi at http://cgma.depauw.edu/seminar.html). The topics have varied widely over the years, including Elvis Presley's Performance venues in Memphis, TN, a historical GIS of the churches in Greencastle (dubbed "God in Greencastle" by the students), and a survey of the old perimeter of Jackson, MS prior to the Civil War fire that ravaged the town. We have learned that the more manageable projects are either campus-based or conducted in local cemeteries. In the example illustrated here (Figure 1), students at DePauw University surveyed the oldest cemetery in Greencastle, IN. They began with a historical map retrieved from city archives. The cemetery was too big to survey completely in the allotted time, so they did a 20% sample; the 10x10 meter grids are recognizable by the clusters of data points superimposed on the aerial map in the GIS. In their initial research proposal, the students had hoped to trace the development of the cemetery over time. However, it became clear that a 20% sample size was too small to generate enough useful data.
This in itself is an important lesson and the students learned that, if they were
to pursue this project beyond the limits of a semester-long course, they would
have to redesign their collection practices. The CGMA course is, thus, more
concerned with
Despite the problems the students encounter along the way, the CGMA seminar has been successful at introducing advanced undergraduates to GIS concepts, i.e., spatial thinking, and to methods and theories of survey archaeology. Some of our former students have gone on to graduate work in Classics and archaeology. By necessity, however, the course is limited to a few students from each of the participating campuses. Moreover, the course practicum demands a lot of supervision and resources. The software — we use ESRI's ArcGIS suite — is not easy to learn. Faculty members teaching the course need a level of expertise, often outside of their own academic training. Maintenance of the computers, servers, and software also requires significant technical support not available on every campus. This has been the main hurdle in expanding the CGMA course through NITLE.
The CGMA seminar is not a general education course and we are now seeking to
introduce GIS concepts, and hence spatial literacy, to students throughout the
Classical Studies curriculum. As noted, the Geospatial Semantic Web (Web 2.0)
now makes this possible. With this proliferation of map 'data', there is an even
more pressing need for undergraduate students to understand precisely what maps
can depict and what they can obscure. While virtual globes
are a far cry
from actual GIS technologies, as they have limited analytical capabilities, they
can be an effective introduction to spatial thinking and a means to scaffold
that skill through the curriculum is capable of providing the core of a humanities GIS
able to integrate, synthesize, and display humanities and spatial data
through one simple and ubiquitous Web interface
Pareto GIS
,
that is, that for the Humanities 20% of GIS capability may be sufficient to
produce 80% of the outcomes. The Geospatial Semantic Web may indeed become the
cornerstone of the future humanities GIS
The following examples use Google Maps for course content and assignments to introduce spatial thinking concepts to students and enhance their appreciation for the role of topography and geography in the formation of human societies. These examples are all drawn from classical archaeology courses but the framework of the assignments and the skill set that they are designed to address could be easily modified to work Greek and Roman civilization as well as Classical literature courses, or, indeed, any history or culture course.
The first two examples are from the 200-level archaeology sequence at DePauw. Those courses are designed for students at the sophomore/junior-level some of whom are majors in Classical Studies, but the majority of whom enroll for general interest and/or to fulfill the arts and humanities requirement of the general education curriculum. In CLST 254: Hellenistic and Roman Art and Archaeology, P. Foss uses Google Maps to enhance the students' experience learning about Ostia Antica. He marks the site of Ostia Antica using different pin designations for different types of structures and provides links to information from another web resource (Figure 2). This example leverages an existing (and well maintained) digital resource, http://www.ostia-antica.org/. In addition to reading about Ostia in their textbook, students are required to use the site in a dynamic way, following connections that catch their interest and developing new questions based on their visual analysis of the site. It can take some time on the part of the professor to build a resource like this, but once it is completed it can be saved and modified for future use.
In this first example, the professor creates a dynamic map and the students follow along. The current generation of students, however, is accustomed not only to referencing digital maps for information but also contributing their own content in the form of location data and digital images. What they are less familiar with, and needs to be intentionally taught, is how to generate new information by connecting data with specific places in order to ask questions about the use of space. The second example attempts to address this issue.
In CLST 263: Greek, Etruscan, and Persian Art and Archaeology, I assign an
article by Catherine Morgan that examines the relationship between the
distribution of sanctuaries in the Corinthia and the development of the Greek
To enhance their understanding of the article, I ask my students to create their
own map of the sanctuaries and cities Morgan references; they can use either
Google Maps or Bing Maps. The goal of the assignment is to produce an
interactive map that allows students of early Greek history to gain a better
understanding of the sacred landscape in the Corinthia between 1000 and 800 BCE.
Students are told to accurately mark the sites and to use other tools to
indicate area and distance between sites. They are also required to provide some
description of each marker and encouraged to include photos and/or links to
external sites. Once they have marked the sites, they are instructed to examine
the relationships between the cities and the sanctuaries taking into account the
topography (i.e., they are supposed to look at the satellite imagery) and write
an analysis. They are also warned that simply Googling
site names does
not necessary give them accurate locations for the ancient sites. They are
encouraged to use other web-based resources, such as Pleiades, an on-line spatial
gazetteer of ancient sites, to geo-reference the ancient sites in Google or
Bing.
The results of this assignment display a range of student enthusiasm as well as capability. In Figure 3, Student A took advantage of the tools available in Google for both display and annotation. They integrated information from Morgan's article with the sites on the map (although they did not supplement this with reference to other web sites or images) and they provided analysis of the physical relationships between the sites. However, they did not necessarily take into account the visible topography. This was one of the few students to place the sanctuary at Isthmia in the correct location. In a second example (Figures 4 and 5), Student B provided a lot of information in the pop-up boxes, including links to useful websites. They also took advantage of the drawing tools in Google Maps to highlight individual features at each site. Unfortunately, they were not precise in their placement of sites, Isthmia is marked at the modern city and Perachora is 'off' slightly from the site. Student C really experimented with the symbolism available in Google Maps (Figure 6), using different pin icons and colors to indicate different categories of information. This student also did not assume a straight line between places as Student A did, rather their route from Corinth to Isthmia follows the modern road (I am not sure how they determined the routes across waterways). This demonstrates that Student C understands that the spaces between places determine relationships, but they relied on the modern determination of the relationship rather than considering the physical environment as it would have existed in antiquity.
Our third example comes from an upper level topics course in archaeology, CLST 310: Ancient Britain. This course is designed for majors in Classical Studies as well as students in allied fields such as history, anthropology, art history, and geology. In this case, the mapping assignment is one component of a semester-long research project. The professor, P. Foss, provides an example of a Google Map that documents prehistoric sites in Orkney (Scotland) by drawing outlines around the sites and providing information with links to reliable websites (Figure 7). The students are then asked to build their own maps of an ancient landscape from a set of choices: Thornborough (Yorkshire), Avebury, or Stonehenge. They are required to research the sites on their own and then create their map by marking, with an outline and/or place pin, the important sites. Students are instructed to make use of color, line-weights, transparency, etc., in order to convey meaningful information. They are also expected to annotate each site with pertinent information from their sources, which could include links to relevant web sites.
Again with this assignment, students display varying levels of attention to detail and presentation strategy. In Figure 8, Student D's map of Avebury looks relatively impressive graphically and in terms of the data. A closer look, however, reveals that while they include some links to scholarly articles, they also link to a 1969 public domain book that, although not intrinsically un-scholarly, is woefully out of date. Of course, this sort of 'mistake' affords the opportunity to talk to the students about careful evaluation of sources before posting them publically.
In Figure 9, we can see that Student E's map has some serious deficiencies. They did not bother to correlate the satellite image with maps of the Stonehenge landscape that would have provided them with accurate names (rather than 'possible settlement') and date ranges for the sites. It does not appear that they even zoomed in to look closely at the satellite image as the pin for Stonehenge itself is placed in the parking lot of the (old) site museum rather than on the actual stone circle. They also did not experiment with the drawing capabilities of Google Maps to make their map visually interesting as well as informative.
In both the CLST 263 and the CLST 310 assignments, students are asked to
demonstrate several key skills in spatial literacy: 1) the accurate
identification of sites or features in a landscape, 2) the use of cartographic
symbols to convey meaning, 3) the presentation of useful data connected to a
specific place, and 4) the visual analysis of a landscape based on the
integration of that data with the spatial relationships between sites. The fact
that some of our students cannot even accomplish skill 1 affirms for us the
importance of spatial thinking exercises in our Classical Studies courses.
Students need to practice spatial thinking skills in the same way that they need
to practice writing. Thus, assignments need to be scaffolded and repetitive,
helping students build a set of skills that they can apply. They should also be
given the opportunity to fix their mistakes and we should emphasize
While Classical Studies may not be an appropriate curricular space for a full-on
GIScience course, we can certainly utilize the available technologies to enhance
our students' spatial skills and at the same time challenge them to use those
technologies for critical analysis of real questions about the ancient
Mediterranean world. The Geospatial Semantic Web (Web 2.0) presents an
opportunity to advance teaching in Classical Studies beyond the textbook
two-dimensional map. Students, at all levels of the curriculum, can be
encouraged to take advantage of this technology to create their own map content,
visualize spatial relationships between place, and develop questions about those
relationships. This is not just a cool tool
to get students engaged with
Classics, it is dynamic way to introduce spatial thinking into the curriculum
(implicitly or explicitly), provide stepping-stones towards spatial literacy for
our students, and enhance our course content.