The Potential of Spatial Humanities

The argument which criticized GIS & positivism resonated and reminded me about Churchill’s (quite overused, sorry) quote that “history is written by the victors.” While history textbooks and historical information is taught and treated as fact, it always speaks the story of the oppressor/winner/power of the time while either silencing or erasing the other side of the story. This ties into Bodenhamer’s argument that GIS reflected the “influence of money and power” in its official representations of the world.

Still, it is important to have some kind of standard system like GIS, even if it might be flawed. It allows logical analyses of a breadth of data. It was even inspiring to read about the potential that GIS has for creating explorative interactive representations and to “create virtual worlds embodying what we know about time and place.” I looked at how GIS + VR are being used today, and learned that the city of Zurich uses a program called CityEngine to create scenes based on existing GIS data to compare urban planning scenarios for sustainable building, which seems like a really useful application of these technologies.

Cartographies of Time - Time in Print

I hadn’t fully pondered the complexity of timelines until the question was presented in this reading. Timelines are visually simple and easy to comprehend, but they are a key example of our continuous discussion about data curation. At what point is a timeline too simple and hides too much context + truth to be classified as meaningful? The quote: “In some cases, filling in an ideal timeline with more and better data only pushed it towards the absurd” reminds me of when I was tasked with an assignment to construct a timeline of the entire history of the Soviet Union. This task feels more absurd in retrospect because it might sound possible but realistically is, like Rosenberg and Grafton would say, pushing towards absurdity.