Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas and the "Icelandic Saga Map"

This essay discusses strategic efforts to develop new digital research tools and approaches as key elements of an inter-disciplinary research initiative in progress, Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM), which aims to study aspects of Icelandic literature, history, archaeology, environment, and geography in order to better understand societal responses to environmental change over the longue durée. The essay showcases a particular digital humanities project, Icelandic Saga Map ( ISM ), which not only provides an extremely useful tool for helping achieve many of the identified aims and methodological needs of an integrated environmental humanities initiative such as IEM but also is a valuable example of how innovative digital humanities tools can foster new research trajectories and open up new horizons for interdisciplinary engagement and synthesis of knowledge and diverse data.