Miles Mapping Commentary

Miles Mapping Commentary

Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time

One thing that I find striking about the figures in this chapter is that many of them push the limits of the printing technologies that make these diagrams possible. One would expect that a major criterion for the success of a given model would be to render typesetting, printing, reproducing, and circulating the physical format easy—and few of these formats are meet that criterion. (I suppose that’s why these have become famous as creative and artistic anomalies rather than as textbook standards.) Priestley’s life-lines would each need custom designs for the whole page to be reproduced; Laurence Sterne’s comical chapter-lines defy the basic implements of the printing press; and even Steinberg’s cartoon, benefitting from the more advanced printing technologies of 1970, would face problems (since you’d want to use high contrast for the thin lines of 1932-1951, but this would probably make the text of “1970” invisible). I think there’s a certain affinity with digital humanities innovations, here: if the tool doesn’t serve the visualization, change what the tool can do.

Bodenhamer, “The Potential of Spatial Humanities”

I find myself wanting to synthesize the two proposals that Bodenhamer makes for the future of GIS-based humanities scholarship on p. 28-9. This goes back to something we touched on last week: namely, that the most likely success of Drucker’s polemic lies in her deconstruction of assumptions about “data” and familiar graphical forms (even if scientists and social scientists are already aware of these limitations), rather than in her constructive proposals for new forms (which, apart from the invention of the “capta” term, were perhaps not as inspiring). To give that idea a concrete example: the gender-demographic bar charts may not be successful as clear and elegant representations of flux in the capta, but they are successful at unsettling our assumptions about the objectivity of data and bar charts. So, perhaps surprisingly, the fact that these visualizations resemble conventional bar charts (for the sake of distorting them) is actually an important part of their usefulness.

To get back to Bodenhammer: it seems that an analogous future for GIS-based humanities projects would begin with the “mature” version of “our current GIS use,” but would contain variations overlaid on that familiar GIS appearance to encourage “postmodern scholarship” (28). A map might begin, for instance, with GIS parameters but change as users select different viewing criteria: chronological, demographic, cultural… Scholars, students, and other visitors to these sites would be able to practice and inhabit the subjectivities of the postmodern approach, while moving in and out of GIS standards that attempt neutrality—thus putting both scholarly approaches, by way of contrast, into illuminating relief.

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