Nordic Spatial Humanities workshop in Reykjavík May 2023

Emily Lethbridge, August 2023

The final international workshop of our series was held in Reykajvík, Iceland, on Monday 22nd May, Tuesday 23rd May and Wednesday 24th May 2023. We were very fortunate to hold the meeting in the brand-new building that houses the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies (together with the Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Iceland). The building is called Edda and it was opened officially on the last day of winter this year (19th April) by the President of Iceland.

The workshop was a hybrid event with 22 participants attending in person and another 16 participating virtually. In addition to the project core members, some participants represented academia, leading DH projects at universities or research institiutes (e.g. Institute for Historical Resarch, University of London; Semantic Computing Research Group, Aalto University; Institute for the Historical Geography of the Church, Lublin, Poland and the Historical Geoinformation Laboratory; Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen; Institute for Medieval Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences; School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University Australia; Institute of the Estonian Language;). Others represented the commercial sector (working e.g. at Google Maps and at Nagoon, http://www.nagoon.se/). And yet others brought perspectives from the Open Geospatial Consortium (https://www.ogc.org/), The World Historical Gazetteer (https://whgazetteer.org/), The International Information Centre for Terminology (http://www.infoterm.info/) as well as from DARIAH-EU (https://www.dariah.eu/). One of the successes of the workshop was providing a platform for members of these respective academic, government and commercial R&D worlds to meet and engage with each other on common interests and challenges regarding spatial-temporal data. Conversations were dynamic and informative and continued outside the workshop programme, over breaks and during the evening events.

The primary aim of the workshop was to review, collectively, the draft-text of a major Horizon Europe infrastructure project application put together in the first instance by Alexandra Petrulevich, Sara Ellis-Nilsson and other core members. After an informal ‘get-to-know’ speed-networking event, work proceeded on different sections of the draft in plenum and in small groups. One main goal (and at times, a pertinent challenge) was ensuring that all present had a clear, shared idea of the aims of the application in preparation, and were in agreement about its importance and impact. Participants were invited as co-creators, and over the course of the workshop were invited to consider potential input from individuals and institutes or companies.

The draft-text had been circulated well in advance of the meeting to give people time to consider it, together with several supporting documents such as an Impact Planning Canvas and notes about possible different roles and responsibilities within the project. Online tools such as Padlet were used to help collect and record input from participants, who answered questions such as: what challenge do you wish to address, or what problem do you wish to solve?; does this challenge or problem transcend sectors?; what data, case study or other expertise might you bring to the project?; what role(s) might you envisage for the yourself/your team?; what do you wish to get out of the project and how might it meet your needs? In another session, proposed work packages were considered in an effort to sharpen more concrete, logistical aspects of the project.

On the afternoon of the first day, a 2-hour-long seminar was held at which members of the new Icelandic Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts (https://mshl.is/cdha/) introduced their projects, and members of the steering committee presented information about the objectives and themes of the Centre. Edward Grey, National Coordination Officer at DARIAH closed this event, giving a talk called “Uplifting Researchers and Cultural Heritage Professionals: The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities”. Another DARIAH employee, Vicky Garnett (Training and Education Officer), gave a talk on “Impact in Focus” in a later session of the workshop.

Particpants left the workshop with a deadline within which to indicate their intention to be part of the consortium, and work continues on the application. Some of the challenges outlined in the application are outlined in a policy brief authored by project members that was selected for inclusion in the NordForsk Fast Track publication Fast Track to Vision 2030 (available online here https://www.nordforsk.org/2023/fast-track-vision-2030).

The Nordic Spatial Humanities project organisers would like to use this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in the Reykajvík workshop, as well as those who were part of the earlier Uppsala and Reykjavík workshops, for their interest and commitment to communicating their expertise and spatial data infrastructure visions.