Time in Print

I definitely saw timelines as simply bare-bones summaries of historic narratives, so I was surprised to read that chronology was among “the most revered of scholarly pursuits”. I thought it was interesting that they could be informing from a “meta” point of view- the ways in which chronologies selected and organized diverse pieces of historical information reflect the priorities and visions of the world at the time of writing. I was also surprised at how the modern form of the timeline is less than 250 years old.

Joseph Priestley’s Chart of Biography in 1765 was criticized because history is not linear- the reading claims that history branches off into subplots with comparisons going back and forth in time. But I thought this was an unfounded claim. Comparisons can be made by linking together different pieces of history, but that doesn’t invalidate the fact that all events happen in a strict sequence of time. I loved the nonlinear infographic technique used by Minard in his diagram showing the size and attrition of Hannibal’s armies, but this is still linear (if not straight).

The Potential of Spatial Humanities

Critics of GIS claim that it rests on positivist epistemology by assuming the existence of an objective reality that we can discover through scientific method, when in fact knowledge is contingent on the perspective of the observer. GIS doesn’t accept uncertainty, and favors official accounts - which are influenced by money and power), while using Western measures such as Euclidean geometry and Boolean logic. However, I don’t think these criticisms prevent GIS from being a valuable tool even if it can’t capture all of the subtleties and ambiguities of the world. Bodenhamer observes that the “quantitative revolution” has yet to enter the mainstream of humanities scholarship, and explains it by the fact that humanists are drawn to questions and evidence that cannot be reduced easily to zeroes and ones. However I believe that quantitative evidence will always provide valuable insight or at least context in some form or another, and it is high time for quantitative methods to be fully embraced in humanities.