What is a deep map? The participants in a 2012 two-week National Endowment for the Humanities Institute program, which focused on deep maps and spatial narratives, provide the following definitions:
Lesley: A source archive united by place or space. It is the anti-interface, but the deep content behind it. It is what enables the spatial narratives.
Johnathan: A way of experiencing a narrative through multiple kinds of content that leads to a well-developed sense of place.
Anouk: A collection of geo-referenced information which offers multiple perspectives on data which has some sort of relevance to place.
Cameron: I’m defining a deep map as a product (different from a deep mapping process). Deep map as product provides an entry point into a humanistic theme through the lens of place. It offers a wide variety of content (often multimedia) that allows for multiple experiences and interpretations (either temporal or spatial) of the same overarching theme.
Katie: A DM is the act of collecting and the collection of multi varied material and immaterial data/information/knowledge about a particular place (and the place(s) to which it has a relationship) by individuals and groups, etc, including what is believed, remembered, experienced, presumed, feared, desired, rumored (and “forgotten”), and the performing of those (by both users and place)
Don: Deep mapping is an epistemology for studying spatial patterns, processes, or phenomena through the integration of a wide-range of spatially and temporally enabled sources.
Allan: Deep map: A collection of interconnected and interrogatable evidential resources that support multiple views and dimensions of interrogation that provide open-ended affordances for enquiry, scholarship and research.
Deep Mapping: the process of constructing or using a deep map
Daniel: A methodology that allow us to combine multiple quantitative, qualitative and multimedia data about a space/place with the purpose of building a spatial narrative
Stuart: A remediation of a set of linked events and processes which require space in order to be meaningful, and which may or may not be discrete.
Mike: A digital worldscape that invites users to investigate and experience real and imagined renderings of places through time and space, with each individual use resulting in a unique spatial narrative that is part of a cumulative and interactive whole.
Mia: A deep map contains geolocated information from multiple sources that convey their source, contingency and context of creation; it is both integrated and queryable through indexes of time and space.
Scott: A deep map is a platform for expressing, exploring, and juxtaposing spatial narratives.
Sharon: an immersive platform for exploring data and information about a place to develop and test research hypotheses, grasp meaning, draw your own conclusions, and present your argument.
David: A dynamic virtual environment that allows users to identify and experience the reciprocal influences of , real and conceptual space on human culture and human events for the purpose of constructing spatial narratives and making spatial arguments.
John C: A depiction of place by means of a spatially-informed display of curated cultural artifacts
Trevor: Deep Map: A spatially and temporally scaled, contingent, semantically rich, open-ended, integrative, multi-medic, representation that portrays the material, immaterial, and human world (and the meaning of life).
Spatial story: Weaves multiple reflexive pathways through a deep map with a specific goal and outcome in mind that tracks its own history and evolution.
