ABSTRACT
Deep maps address the problem noted almost a century ago by Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and other theorists who recognized the disjuncture between the Enlightenment world of logical-rational empiricism and the nascent world of Einsteinian relativity and phenomenology. Geographic information systems (GIS) facilitated a (re)discovery of geographical space in history and the humanities. Although epistemologically branded, geo-spatial technologies still offer potential for history and the humanities. The movement toward a humanities-based geospatial infrastructure also led to an early international effort, the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, to spur the development of GIS-based, linked cultural atlases. Humanities researchers who embraced GIS saw its potential for creating a form of interdisciplinary scholarship identified more by its characteristics than any theoretical approach or body of scholarship. The goal is not to sacrifice the rational, and empirical approach to knowledge that has been the hallmark of the humanities since the Enlightenment, but rather to complement it with different ways of discovery.
