Digital Humanities Center

The virtual research environment for the Spatial Humanities

In the Digital Humanities, digital tools for non-textual cultural expressions and their spatio-temporal classification are of great importance in addition to classical applications in the field of processing digital text and language resources. Our tool Spacialist meets this challenge with a customizable data model capable of digitally capturing all aspects of human cultural creation and translating them into semantic and analyzable relationships. In doing so, the integrated digital tools also provide the ability to accurately and collaboratively capture and document endangered objects, spaces, and intangible cultural expressions. This enables their permanent and sustainable preservation and ensures their availability for research purposes. Spacialist uses a role-based authorization model that can be customized to meet the needs of each research project. All that is required to use the Spacialist software is a web browser.

We install, host, and maintain project-specific Spacialist instances for fees that cover costs, and we provide a customized quote in advance. Contact us if you would like to explore possibilities of using Spacialist in your research context with us!

Function and application

Spacialist is now a modularly extensible application platform that is customized and instantiated for each research project. The basis of the platform is a metamodel that makes objects, their properties and relationships flexible and precisely definable on a project-specific basis. With the help of the tool ThesauRex, Spacialist offers the possibility to create controlled multilingual vocabularies (thesauri) according to the XML-based W3C standard Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) in order to name the objects, their properties and possible expressions of the properties in the data model.

The core functionality of Spacialist consists of:

  • a hierarchical data organization.
  • the possibility to enter and collaboratively edit the data objects with customizable editing masks.
  • interactive maps on which data objects can be geographically located. Extension modules provide additional functionality as needed, such as data analysis, literature management, file management and viewing, or a geographic information system.

For example, the screenshot at the first paragraph of this page shows a Spacialist instance that collects data about countries, cities, and world heritage sites and locates them on a map.

Open-source software

All software components of Spacialist are available as open-source software on GitHub:

Typically, we install and host the project-specific instances of the Spacialist software on our web servers. However, with appropriate IT skills, the software can in principle also be installed and hosted on your own server.

Origins and project background

The project "Spacialist" was funded from mid-2016 to the end of 2018 by the funding program "E-Science Baden-Württemberg - Virtual Research Environments" by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg. The goal of the project was to provide a tool for the spatial and object-oriented sciences that allows standardized acquisition and analysis as well as long-term archiving and reusability of research data. A high degree of standardization as well as a sustainable preservation of the information are of particular importance in the field of humanities due to the irretrievability of the data.

At that time, the eScience Center (today's Digital Humanities Center) was responsible for project coordination and software development. During the funding phase, cooperation included the following partners:

  • Department of Computer Science, Information Services (University of Tübingen).
  • Institute for Prehistory and Archaeology of the Middle Ages, Department for Recent Prehistory and Early History (University of Tübingen)
  • State Office for Monument Preservation Baden-Württemberg
  • Archaeological Institute of the University of Göttingen