8 J. S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3–4.
Acknowledgments
I would like to recognize the influence and encouragement of the following individuals: Professors Poul Holm, Anne Buttimer, Gunnar Olsson, Jane Ohlmeyer, David Nemeth, David Bodenhamer, Ian Gregory, Kevin Archer, and Stephen Reader; Drs. David Drew, Alexander von Lünen, Mary Gilmartin, Mark Hennessy, Stephen McCarron, Kieran Rankin, Krysia Rybaczuk, and Francis Ludlow; the poet Brendan Kenneally; and Gabriel García Márquez. I am grateful to Jo D’Arcy; Eadaoin Clarke and the Clarke family; Walter Price; my late father, Professor Charles Travis; my mother Kathleen Glavin Travis; and the Trinity Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin. I want to acknowledge Esri Press for shepherding the manuscript to production. I want to thank David Bowie, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, and the members of U2 for lessons in how creativity can bloom from the most unexpected places.
Chapter 1
Introduction
Figure 1.1 The Lascaux Cave paintings (Hall of Bulls). Photo courtesy of Jack Versloot (http://flickr.com/photos/80749232@N00).
From Lascaux to the Sea of Tranquility
The series of Paleolithic paintings of humans, animals, and cryptic signs that adorn the stone walls of the Lascaux cave complex in southwestern France (figure 1.1) bestow on humanity a 20,000-year-old tableau that we can appreciate, in an ontological sense, as one of the earliest humanities GIS models ever created. To literal minds, the images perhaps represent no more than the esoteric daubs of our ancestors huddled in fear around a primordial fire. To imaginative minds, however, the creative use of pigments, derived from local flora and fauna, illustrates a prehistoric knack for storytelling, artistry, and technological prowess. Indeed, these cave paintings, because they unambiguously plot the human-environmental interactions of hunter-gatherers, act as a primal GIS created to convey the “spatial stories” of a nomadic people still in thrall to the great myths and mysteries of the universe.
Fast-forward to the late twentieth century. We see Homo sapiens chart the solar system and navigate an Apollo rocket and lunar module to the Sea of Tranquility on the surface of the moon. Through its portal, we gaze back on an earthrise from the module’s hi-tech cave. Now we cue the spool of history to the present to witness the digital revolution creating waves that ripple through the sciences, arts, and humanities. Amidst this great change, words such as mapping have emerged as important metaphors. In the arts and humanities, scholars navigate texts and explore the spatial and geographical dimensions of literary, cultural, and historical works.1 Indeed, these spatial and cultural turns reveal that there are still many regions of terrae incognitae left to explore and map.
Drawing on tropes in the spatial and digital humanities, literary theory, and critical thought, this book illustrates how geographers can model and apply GIS techniques typically employed in the natural and social sciences to literary, cultural, and historical studies. This book takes the view that a humanities GIS model provides a discursive and artistic platform that we can use to visualize and spatialize stories and plot conventional empirical narratives. In addition, GIS can also be employed to perform ergodic and deformative interpretive mappings of literary, cultural, and historical works; create innovative, interactive digital texts; and foster insightful mapping experiences. This book targets students, researchers, and academics engaged in the digital humanities and anyone interested in how location, place, and space can illuminate their respective area of study.
What is a GIS?
For centuries, maps were sketched painstakingly by hand with materials such as ink, papyrus, sheepskin, parchment, and paper. The transition from traditional forms of mapmaking to interactive, digital mapping platforms, such as GIS, began in the late twentieth century. In our age, geocoded digital images proliferate, conjured on plasma screens by fingertip strokes on cybernetic keyboards that parse signals from earth-orbiting satellites. In the 1970s, computer mapping introduced the first digital maps and automated the drafting process from the sketching table to the computer screen. In the 1980s, electronic database systems linked to digital maps, which allowed the visual display of multidimensional data variables and provided the foundation for many GIS systems operating today.
A geographic information system, or GIS, provides a digital platform upon which multiple map layers (called shapefiles and rasters) electronically stack on top of each other to create composite images. Each shapefile layer and its attendant data table display unique variables (represented as points, polylines, and polygons). Layers can also be composed of a pixelated terrain or map images called rasters. The GIS operator digitally manipulates the order of the stacked layers and associated data tables, creating any number of connections between the spatialized variables to produce composite mappings, visual representations, and spatial models for analysis.
GIS software offers the potential to orchestrate, analyze, and visualize spatial stories as numerous as the shapefile and data variable combinations GIS operators can make. Collectively, as David Staley notes,
Geographic information systems are one example of a suite of technologies—from data mining to immersive virtual reality displays to complex mathematical spaces—that have been collectively labelled “information visualizations.” A visualization is any graphic that organizes data into spatial forms for purposes of display, analysis, interpretation, and communication.2
Traditionally, GIS technology has engaged Cartesianism and Euclidian geometry with positivist methodologies to create what the historian Michel de Certeau describes as “a formal ensemble of abstract places.”3 Similar to cartographic tools that translate the perceptible world onto a legible tableau, GIS constitutes an “abstract machine” designed to create conceptual spaces in which users can collate and then quantify, geocode, and visualize singular events and larger patterns to produce a qualitative “collage of moments.”4 The space-time backgrounds created by this combination of cybernetic systems and software languages produce a “qualculative” world in which calculation is defined as not necessarily being precise and super-computing technologies, qualitative choices, and ambiguity empower users to explore place and write space in different ways, both literally and metaphorically.5 In this new world, GIS can be configured for use beyond positivistic endeavors and applied with innovation and imagination to the terrae incognitae of the humanities.
In this regard, a humanities GIS model provides a phenomenological tool that brackets events and patterns in both time and space. GIS can help users devise methodologies that are both quantitative (plotting geometric and numerical data relationships) and qualitative (juxtaposing attribute data relationships) to tackle important questions in literary, cultural, and historical studies. (See examples of the former in chapter 3 and the latter in chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7.) Whether a GIS is employed for quantitative or qualitative research, the selection of data involves a high degree of subjectivity—a trope with which arts and humanities scholars are conversant. Using GIS, these scholars can employ a spatial lens and apply many perspectives and analyses to any given