In geography, Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975) and the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography developed a new methodological lens based on a cultural concept of landscape that rejected the idea of environmental determinism. Sauer’s morphological studies of regions and societies placed particular emphasis on the temporal dimension of a panoramic lens:
We cannot form an idea of landscape except in terms of its time relations as well as it space relations. It is in continuous process of development, or of dissolution and replacement.20
The school emphasized a synchronic approach to researching and mapping historical, cultural, and physical landscapes. Although empirically oriented in his methodology, Sauer recognized the significant role that subjective perception played in creating distinct “senses of place” rooted in the phenomenological symbiosis existing between particular regions and cultures.
Figure 2.3 The ruins of space and time: Czechoslovakian postage stamp of Picasso’s Guernica. Stamp image courtesy vvoe/Shutterstock.com. Stamp shows Guernica painting by Pablo Picasso from Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (ca. 1967).
Nevertheless, twentieth-century cartography remained anchored in Euclidean geometry, even as intellectual and artistic praxes moved toward Einsteinian concepts of time-space.21 These parallel tracks, which resembled the approaches of Cartesian perspectivalism and the seventeenth-century Dutch mapping impulse, manifested as two distinct schools of geographic practice. The former gave birth to the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, with its emphasis on spatial modeling and computing, while the latter shaped geography’s second cultural turn during the 1970s and 1980s, during which humanistic and postmodern scholars applied the metaphor of text to the acts of reading landscapes, conducting fieldwork, and framing social life.22
Post-structuralist perspectives
During this period, the word mapping emerged as a significant metaphor in the arts and humanities as scholars began to show strong interests in the roles of place, space, and the implicit geographical dimensions of literary and cultural texts.23
Emphasizing the spatial and postmodern trends emerging in the 1980s, Roland Barthes defined the word text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”24 The cross-pollination of these two methodological metaphors across disciplinary boundaries informed cartographic historian J. B. Harley’s seminal observation:
“Text” is certainly a better metaphor for maps than the mirror of nature. Maps are a cultural text. By accepting their textuality we are able to embrace a number of different interpretative possibilities. Instead of just the transparency of clarity we can discover the pregnancy of the opaque.25
Despite the new semiotic approach to studying landscape, by the end of the twentieth century, developments in computer science allowed GIS to become the indispensable tool for geographical research and analysis in government, business, and academia.26
This development in the arts and humanities coincided with the unprecedented phenomena of digital globalization facilitated by visual broadcast media and the World Wide Web. Marshall MacLuhan’s observation in 1964 that, after more than a “century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned,” was radically prescient.27 The ubiquitous use of personal computers, tablets, and smartphones; consumption of 24-hour mass-media outlets; and proliferation of social media profoundly shaped twenty-first-century geographic perceptions and practices. GIS, GPS, computer cartography, and online open-source geospatial software are framing the earth as a geocoded world that is continuously being coded, decoded, and recoded as new cybernetic language systems and platforms emerge and evolve.28 Manuel Castells’ argument that the geography of the new history will be constructed out of the interface between places and flows seems remarkably apt.29 Contemporary human geographical practices are engaging space as a dynamic “lifeworld” and a “quasi-material construct” produced by social interaction. Rather than a passive container, today space is increasingly considered as an active agent, infused with human behavior and perception, which is constantly shaping, producing, and reproducing places socially, politically, and economically.30
Recently, Nigel Thrift has promoted nonrepresentational theory as an experimental perspective concerned with the geography of what happens. This approach pulls the vibrant energy of the performing arts into the social sciences by crawling out on the edge of a conceptual cliff. Thrift proposes that, because of the intervention of software, the human body has become a tool-being in symbiosis with a new electronic time-space that shapes our perceptions and experiences of the world, echoing Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory.31 Therefore, the current geographical concern with human performativity and dynamic social space, and their relationships to “automated” mapping functions, cyber linguistics, and Web 2.0 (social media)/3.0 (semantic, geosocial, and 3D visualization) platforms, can facilitate deeper and more experimental forms of GIS engagement with research and scholarship in the arts and humanities.
Deep mapping
As a result of the spatial turn in the humanities, the word mapping became a discursive metaphor that scholars employed to discuss the spaces and places that shaped literary and historical texts and were represented in them. By establishing humanities GIS models, scholars can now explore, survey, chart, map, and navigate textual journeys in a literal sense. Traditionally, under the umbrella of spatial science, users employed GIS to map distributions and patterns but engaged little in mapping the lyrical, subjective, temporal, and esoteric notions of place and human experience. The predominant positivistic perspective encounters a greater challenge in performing qualitative analysis and visualizing critical theoretical relationships in GIS, as well as captures the dynamic nature of evolving networks, the cascade of historical events, and the myriad social flows that interlink people and places.32
By adopting postmodern approaches, however, we can use GIS technology to create unique opportunities to construct alternate constructions of history and culture that embrace multiplicity, simultaneity, complexity, and subjectivity.33 By placing historical and cultural exegesis more explicitly in space and time, GIS can identify patterns, facilitate comparisons, enhance perspectives, and visualize data in any number of ways. Currently, humanities-influenced methodologies are taking GIS technology beyond the limits imposed by positivism. Examples include “deep-mapping” techniques and approaches that engage oral cultures and storyscapes, detect semiotic traces on landscapes, and provide experiential interfaces with virtual data and immersive geospatial environments.
The writer William Least Heat Moon (William Trogdon) first conceptualized deep mapping as a vertical form of travel writing in his book PrairyErth (1991). This approach both records and represents the grain and patina of place through the interpenetrations and juxtapositions of the past and the present, the political