Erik Steiner is the Creative Director and co-founder of the Spatial History Project at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University and a former President of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). He is an interaction designer and cartographer working at the intersection of technology, creative arts, and academic scholarship in the humanities and social and environmental sciences. He has led the design and development of dozens of interactive and information design projects through major grants from the Getty, Kress and Mellon Foundations, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies. His creative work has won multiple national and international awards, notably for the interactive Atlas of Oregon and the Nolli Map of Rome Website. His recent collaborative work includes Geographies of the Holocaust, Richard Pryor’s Peoria, and Enchanting the Desert.
The work of the Spatial History Project at Stanford makes for an interesting case study on how collaborative interdisciplinary work can operate in a world of rapidly developing technology and the tools that accompany that technology. His work, and that of the Spatial History Project, demonstrates indeed, that if we embrace the potential of technology and its tools in humanities and social science research we create the potential for new insights into the human condition. In an essay about his work, Dr. Steiner remarks: “In our lab, we have discovered the power of data to recreate past landscapes – both real and imagined. Our collaborative projects span a variety of scales and historical events, and are continually challenged by the difficulty of interpreting data of uncertain completeness, quality, and provenance. Not only a powerful way to make new arguments or substantiate old ones, visualizing history is a means of generating many more questions that would otherwise go unasked, and telling stories that would otherwise go untold.” Through innovative uses of technology, Dr. Steiner and his colleagues show that humanities research can be invigorated, provide substantial new knowledge and insight, and it can be done in exciting interdisciplinary and collaborative ways.