Stuart Dunn
SSI fellow
Lecturer, Centre for e-Research, Kings's College London
Interests
- volunteered geographic information and crowd-sourcing
- historic notions of place, especially related to empire and occupation
- software needed to interrogate location references on the Web
Research
Stuart’s research is concerned with the history and representation of space and location: he is interested in how people, location and place interact, and how those interactions can be expressed and analysed digitally. At the moment, he is especially interested in how the presence of power and occupation is attested through both digital and analogue mapping. This can manifest itself in a practical way, i.e. the application of GIS to historical toponyms and non-extant hierarchical and administrative systems; or in more abstract analysis of spatial semantics. Stuart also researches the perception, representation and interpretation of past environments and how these can be reconstituted digitally, without imposing arbitrary constructs that are not, or cannot, be supported by empirical data. He also has research interests in the development and deployment of social media and crowd-sourcing platforms and services for scholars in the digital humanities. He is particularly interested in volunteered geographical information (VGI), and the kinds of software and, increasingly, of hardware that are important in keeping pace with the ever-expanding corpus of VGI online. He has helped develop a typology of humanities crowd-sourcing, and hopes to use the opportunity afforded by the SSI fellowship to investigate the long-term sustainability of these platforms, and of the data they produce. He will also seek to broaden this into a wider discussion of software sustainability in the Digital Humanities more generally – an area which has historically been underrepresented in the field’s discourses.
Check out contributions by and mentions of Stuart Dunn on www.software.ac.uk
