(although, actually, all the talk about using a GIS is in the second part!)
I often feel like I’m a few drinks behind the rest of the crowd when it comes to drinking the digital humanities Kool-Aid. This is kind of a problem, because a chunk of what I’m trying to do with my dissertation is necessarily using software, hardware, and datasets to try and interpret some things about US novels from the 1930s. I should feel, then, right at home in digihum projects, but for some reason… it’s still not quite clicking. Much of what I see online strikes me as amateurish, tentative, or unsatisfying–which, to be fair, also was the general consensus around the chapter I presented last week at the American Cultures Workshop at the University of Chicago.
But my friend Manan, who works for Humanities Computing at the University, asked me to present something broader about some of the techniques I used to produce my paper. This was a great opportunity to explain in more detail about what I see as a potential source of trouble (strawman alert) in some “digital” approaches to the humanities, which is the reliance on “flat maps” to push along arguments. So here’s my presentation:
If you want to download just the PowerPoint (don’t judge!), I’ve got it up here: GIS for the Humanities.
In this first part of the post, I’ll tackle the first 14 slides of the presentation, which demonstrate what flat maps look like, how some people are using flat maps in the humanities, and ways that one can do the same. I’m not categorically against this sort of work, I feel I have to repeat constantly. I just don’t think it’s as groundbreaking as it seems (like when the Chronicle writes about it).
Anyway, here is the sort of “annotated version” of the first part of the presentation. All links open in new windows.
Space is terribly important in researching the Humanities, though it has often taken a backseat to history. Foucault was asked about this by geographer editors of Hérodote, and his responses (translated in 1980 into English and available in Power/Knowledge) slowly force him into acknowledging this oversight (though Foucault was always somewhat spatial). Jameson, on the other hand, claims that space has become newly important as a result of postmodernism. Soja, then, takes these two areas as jumping off grounds for his own positing of a postmodern geography.
If space is important then, how do we, as researchers, interact with it?
One avenue is Neogeography, which is the sort of user-contributed, web-based, amateur generation of cartographic information. This includes things like Flickr maps, personal Google Maps, and even technology that relies on geographical information without generating maps, like Photosynth. Google has managed to corner the market on this sort of technology, by both opening up the Google Maps API (GPS-enabled pigeons help monitor pollution) and by creating Google Earth, which has launched neogeography into the stratosphere.
Google Earth has been already used to help situate literary works on the site GoogleLitTrips. Aimed at the kiddie market, the site distributes .kmz files that have geocoded locations from works of literature. But the maps depend on Google Earth’s often sloppy layout. Though one can jump from point to point, creating a “trip,” it’s not too terribly dynamic. A similar entry in this sort of thing is Gutenkarte, which was developed by, among other people, Schuyler Erle. Gutenkarte, however, is not much different from the literary atlases that J. G. Bartholomew compiled at the start of the 20th century–especially since it only maps works in the Public Domain! Eventually, the site promises, there will be more interactivity, but for now, it’s more an exercise in showing how powerful the MetaCarta GeoParser is.
A few steps farther down the development chain is the Map of Early Modern London, a project undertaken up in Canada. Based on a 16th century map of London, it is an interactive tour de force of information about various locations in London, and the site “aims to recreate some of what [Editor Janelle] Jenstad calls ‘the imaginative landscape of the place,’ its ‘cultural geography.’” The unspecificity of this kind of language irritates me, since it does not seem to have any analytic force. Jenstad writes on the map’s site that she uses the map to show “the geographical relationship between the city and Renaissance theatres, to map out the routes of processions and pageants” and the like. That’s fine, but what, precisely, makes a “geographical relationship”? Is Jenstad using the human eye to detect these relationships? (famously unreliable!)
These sorts of projects have merit, of course. They’re providing an index, a point of reference. They’re telling you what you already know, except spatially. Or they’re telling you something you didn’t know, in more detail. This means they also provide context (both within the text and against the material world). They also–and here’s where something like “imaginative landscape” comes in–allow a sort of empathetic / sentimental entryway into a certain space of alterity that’s certainly useful for readers.
But in their attachment toward presenting a narrative spatially–flattening a narrative–they are not providing any real analysis or doing much different than what Bartholomew did besides adding interactivity. They are to Bartholomew as Encarta is to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I adore maps in the beginnings of novels, for example, but they mostly serve no other purpose than to either get me excited about what will happen or help me keep various narrative balls in the air. They never tell me something new about the text itself. That may not be their point, but it also means that they aren’t useful as, say, a dissertation project. Nor do they demonstrate, in my opinion, quite enough dynamism to force the spatial turn away from having just history as the engine of analysis.
That’s what I mean when I call this sort of mapping “flat.” I don’t know where I got the term from. Likely suspects are Deleuze and Guattari, in which case “flat maps” are like their concepts of a “tracing,” but I may have gotten it from Moretti. They reproduce, they don’t provide new entryways. Yet often, that seems to be enough as far as people are concerned. The rhetorical flourish of a pretty map (one that I’ve made use of before) wows the audience, even if there’s no real there there.
If that’s ok, though, and one wants to make a flat map, I suggested using OpenStreetMaps instead of Google Maps. I also encouraged people to use the David Rumsey Collection’s downloadable kmz to help situate spatial data among historical maps.
In the second part of this post, I’ll talk more about what a GIS is, and how I see its use in doing actual research and analysis in the humanities, instead of just creating reproductions.
Tags: Deleuze and Guattari, digital humanities, Edward Soja, Franco Moretti, geography, GIS, humanities, Michel Foucault, modernism, postmodernism, tracing
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