Cartographies of Time

Overall, I thought it was very interesting that the study of the timeline was more important than the study of history, at one point of time. I never thought of them as separate fields of study until reading this text. When reading about Eusebius’s chronological table, I was instantly drawn back to my timeline prototype, where I focused on viewing US & Iran events in parallel. I like the quote “chronology and geography were the two eyes of history: sources of precise, unquestionable information, which introduced order to the apparent chaos of events”. I believe this understanding of the two fields will be the basis of how we look at alternative ways to organize events in time and space, and work on our mapping project. Diving deeper into Minard’s infographic, I thought it was a shockingly modern design. I feel like infographics today using various web tech follow Minard’s style as well.

The Potential of Spatial Humanities

When reading this chapter, it seemed like one of the big shortcomings of GIS, especially in the context of humanities based research, is that it privileges quantitative data over qualitative data. It didn’t allow for fuzzy data, which can be detrimental to certain humanistic endeavours. For example, in the Moby Dick data, there’s data points that can’t be mapped to real geographic places. In it’s out of the box preparation, it focuses on the Western view of the world. I think one of the advantages of GIS is “moving history”. The text discusses how GIS could simply not work for many forms of humanities who rely on forms of “spaces” that don’t necessarily map to a Cartesian coordinate system. It also talks about how it did work somewhat for history and archeology, two fields that fall under this idea of “moving history”, where time based data is tied to physical locations and movement from one place to another. I thought the idea of combining GIS with other media in the form of “deep maps” was very interesting, and quite relatable to modern day digital humanities projects catering to various “senses”.