The theme for our 2010 Summer Institute is Mapping People, a broad topic that reflects the interests of humanities and social science faculty at Redlands and coincides with Census 2010. The 2010 LENS Fellows represent the disciplines of archaeology, history, and literature, and have individual and collective interests in Native Americans, cultural and social activities in the American West, borders, trans-nationalism, and post-colonial legacies. Though these interests are diverse, they all touch on mapping culture, mapping narratives and history, and mapping complex understandings of place.

The types of questions we will address at the 2010 Institute include:

• In what ways can our understanding of cultural and social information be represented with digital mapping technologies? What and where are the limitations of those technologies? How are mapping technologies being connected with other systems for collecting social information (such as social networking maps)?
• How can we best use digital images of maps and other geographic information to support and illustrate our classroom activities? What critical questions do we want students to ask and understand about how cultural and social information has been mapped in the past and can be mapped in the future?
• When we select from the current suite of digital mapping technologies (desktop GIS mapping applications, virtual globes such as Google Earth, simple online map mashups, etc.) to use in our teaching and research, what are the tradeoffs? How can faculty best dive into this complex realm and find new insights for their teaching and research, without making too many compromises based on the technologies and approaches they choose to use?