About Me
Omer Shadmi is a scholar of Jewish history and a humanities cartographer whose work explores the relationships between places, geographical information, and the stories through which people understand their surroundings. Spatial Studio brings together historical research, GIS, spatial analysis, and cartographic design to develop maps and geographical resources for research and other applications.
Exploring places
I’ve been exploring places my entire life. First as a wanderer. Since childhood, my explorations have widened in circles: the house, the street, the neighbourhood, the town, and eventually across the country on the Israel Trail, and through many other countries.
Reading is another way I explore. In novels, television, art, street signs, graffiti, advertisements, and news, I keep returning to questions of place: Where does this happen? Why here? How does a place shape a story—and how do stories shape our understanding of a place?
More than a decade of working as a tour guide, leading thousands of people across Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding region, informs how I understand places. This work has brought me to places rarely visited by Jewish Israelis like myself, and into conversation with people whose perspectives challenge and broaden my own. These encounters keep me attentive to the complexity of places, especially the place I call home.
The same curiosity drives my academic research. My PhD in Jewish History examines how the Babylonian Talmud turns geographical places into places of meaning and belonging. At its heart is a question rooted in the ancient world that remains familiar today: how do texts, stories, and everyday practices make a place feel like home?
Cartography and GeoAI – artificial intelligence applied to geographical information – offer new ways to explore. For example, my project 50sqkm brings together maps of a single area to investigate its natural, social, historical, and political complexity. Each map offers another way of seeing the place; together, they form a geographical encyclopedia. My travelogues turn journeys into cartographic stories, while gift maps give visual form to personal connections with places.
Through Spatial Studio, I bring these approaches into work with scholars, research projects, and organizations. Whether the starting point is a scholarly question, a practical need, or a memorable journey, I aim to make geographical information clear, useful, and engaging.