ABSTRACT
The 1970s and 1980s the humanities and social sciences witnessed numerous challenges to interpretations and methods that had dominated their disciplines for decades. Commonly called turns, signifying departures, the list included the cultural turn, linguistic turn, contingency turn, and a host of others. 1 Prominent among them was the spatial turn, with concepts of space and spatiality suddenly in vogue among scholars. It promised new perspectives to our study of society and culture, but what was this spatial turn? When did it begin – and why? What relationship did it have to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a powerful technology with increasing presence in our daily lives? And what has been its impact in the humanities?
