Historiarum

It feels much less than four months ago that we began working our way through the process of historical mapping. This certainly was a demanding class, but I feel that the payoff was well worth it. In the end I was able to incorporate not just a lot about what we learned theoretically about creating historical maps, but also most of the technical skills that we struggled to master become familiar with during the semester. Despite my initial difficulties with the heinous Pen Tool in Illustrator, I was able to use it to color 3 maps that contextualized the two stadiums in their respective neighborhoods. I also made good use of the SketchUp model discussed in the last post, and think it was very useful in making comparisons with the professionally produced model of RFK Stadium. With the two models it was easy to demonstrate the differences in the way fans experienced the space both within and outside of the stadiums. I think the modest conclusions I came to (which you can read in the pdf files below) open up a number of avenues for further inquiry. For example, did the central and synthetic presence of early parks within their neighborhoods influence the social consciousness regarding baseball? Was baseball’s prominence related to this spatial prominence? Similarly, it would be fascinating to chart the growth of the piecemeal style ballpark with the growth of the buildings surrounding it and see what correlations there are and what conclusions that might lead to.

Below are pdf files of the final, ready-to-print, layout.

Page One
Page Two
Page Three

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I’m not sure I bit off more than I can chew in choosing to rebuild Griffith Stadium, but it’s certainly very close. SketchUp has proved to be one of those pieces of software you can really immerse yourself in; as in, “Wow! It’s 4am and I can’t feel my legs-I better go to bed!” Once I had the more rudimentary tasks down I became more and more frustrated by the limitations of the basic shapes. Especially since my building was filled with odd shapes and junctions. At times it became a fairly tedious process of trying to make point A line up with point B without affecting points C and D. For example the support beams I built to hold up the bleachers and roof proved extremely difficult to properly align, and I am certain that in the real world my building would topple over quickly.

However, any time you get to spend with your source material is time well spent, and working these photos and maps over in an effort to build the model really proved revealing. For example, I anticipated being able to get a feel for how it would have looked to sit in the seats at Griffith Stadium, and develop the sense of intimacy that old parks were known for. But I also came to understand that the sight lines one had beyond the stadium were also different than what we have grown accustomed to. Namely, it became possible to see the surrounding area, giving a sense that the park was part of the neighborhood. This makes sense when one thinks how these parks were generally built in more central locations rather than on the far edges of town.

Overall, despite the immense amounts of time SketchUp required to produce a viable model, I found it particularly rewarding. The results, along with some of the source images are below:

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One of the often promised advantages of new media is the ability to combine different datasets into unique presentations. Just perusing Yahoo Pipes, for example, we see the aggregation of concert dates for multiple London music venues made available in a digital calendar format or an RSS feed which captures all tabloid news about Britney Spears. Yahoo Pipes is often referred to what has become one of the most ubiquitous terms of the digital twenty-first century, mashup. Originally referential to music which overlayed multiple songs, mashup has come to be a catch all for creations that combine different information and media (often all of which is not original material) into something new. The OED even felt compelled to canonize it (with a hyphen, as mash-up) in 2006 largely in reference to the musical revolution taking place. However, Wikipedia also offers some insight into the mashup on the web, contending, “In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool….”

This idea is very familiar for us having worked much of this semester to present specific historical material cartographically, especially after spending time with Google Earth and Maps this past week. In fact, the Wikipedia mashup entry continues with a description, “an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.”

The last part of the example seems to be precisely what we are trying to accomplish in this class. Take out “web service” and replace it with “historical argument.” Thinking about the Rumsey Maps on Google Earth or the historical projects that abound on Google Maps such as the Las Vegas, NM Historic Sites map or Sites of Ancient Rome, or the Mongol Empire, it becomes clear that these tools allow us to think about and present history in new and exciting ways. Throw in our SketchUp skills and it seems we can bring mashups even into the realm of history!

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All semester we have played with the idea of what a map is. Over time we have expanded the concept to include battleships, baseball stadiums, and closets. But if pushed, how would we define these documents we have been studying and producing these past months?

Oxford American offers the following definitions of the term, which might serve as a baseline for us.

noun
1 a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc. : a street map | figurative expansion of the service sector is reshaping the map of employment.
• a two-dimensional representation of the positions of stars or other astronomical objects.
• a diagram or collection of data showing the spatial arrangement or distribution of something over an area : an electron density map.
• Biology a representation of the sequence of genes on a chromosome or of bases in a DNA or RNA molecule.
• Mathematics another term for MAPPING.
2 informal dated a person’s face.

While my personal favorite would be “a person’s face” (and I hope to bring this back in vogue), 1(c) “a diagram or collection of data showing the spatial arrangement or distribution of something over an area” seems to best capture the spirit we have been affording the idea of a map.

However, after reading You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination this week I was thinking that even though this description is nicely ambiguous and allows us great play in deciding how to categorize maps, it lacked what I have come to think of as an essential quality of a map-its referential information system. All maps are inherently self-referential in that its symbolic entities are symbiotic with each other. But they can also be referential to other maps and contexts of knowledge. For example, I started making a list of the themes of some of the maps in You Are Here. Within the first couple of chapters it contained visualizations of such disparate subjects as bodies, virtues, dreams, politics, values, economics, ambition, class, and tradition, among many others.

Essentially, the Oxford American dictionary doesn’t seem to hold a place for some of the maps in You Are Here, such as the morality maps or dream maps. Nor does it capture the crux of what maps are capable, how they can represent information that is wholly unreliant on place. So I’m working on a brief, descriptive definition of a map given all we have experienced. So far what i have come up with is “a document used to symbolically present the referential placement of entities,” but I’m not sure I’m happy with that. For starters I’d like it to be in English.

What do you all think?

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My first few tries with Natural Scene Designer yielded some uninspiring results as the topographies came off a bit flat.

So I settled on one of the most awe-inspiring places I have ever seen in my life so far-Hurricane Pass in Grand Teton National Park. A friend and I had planned out a day hike which involved hitchhiking to a gondola which would do most of the climbing for us, and then walking twenty-five miles downhill. The plan fell apart when no one would pick us up, and quickly morphed into a literal marathon in which we climbed 13 miles more or less straight up before turning around and coming back before nightfall.

The funny part of the story is I was so beaten by mile 12.9 that with only a few hundred yards to go, I was ready to turn back before reaching the summit of Hurricane Pass. My friend Dennis was already back on his way down (we were going at our own paces by this point, despite a run-in with a bear who would also say hi on the return trip), and I asked him point blank if it was worth it. He chuckled, told me it was, and climbed back to the top with me.

As you can see from the dopey grins on our faces, the final ascent was . With Grand Teton, and three other peaks at our backs, we looked down into a gorgeous rolling green valley from which poured subliminally cool, energizing mountain air. The picture doesn’t really capture it, but you can get an idea. Suddenly the walk back to the car seemed less formidable.

So aside from a personal anecdote, where is the history? Well, this spot was a sacred place to local Native Americans. In fact it was considered the birthplace of the world. I’m convinced. Interestingly, I find the images from Natural Scene designer very evocative, moreso than many of the pictures I took there. You can capture a wider frame of reference more accurately. For kicks I threw in a view similar to the one in the picture. Not quite the same as being there, but a good surrogate for a grad student sitting in front of his computer most of the day.

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I have a friend who rode his bicycle across the United States once. He told me the hardest part of the trip was not the Rockies in Colorado or the deserts of Nevada, but a hill on Rt. 30 (the old Lincoln Highway) near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He told me it wasn’t the steepest grade, but it went forever. Friends he was riding with were breaking down in tears-and this was the end of the trip.

While I did not experience any physical pain, I now too know the frustration of the hills near Gettysburg.

A few years ago someone gave me a giant military atlas of the Civil War. I don’t have a great interest in the Civil War, so I haven’t really looked at it much. I actually mostly used it to keep a series of posters in good condition. So I thought this assignment would be a perfect opportunity to utilize this book. After playing around with some of the really intricate maps (these were all drawn by army engineers and seem to me to be EXTREMELY precise), I quickly realized my artistic limitations necessitated something a little simpler. I settled on a map of Gettysburg that was relatively small and that seemed to match my artistic capabilities. So I laid my grid and began with the roads, and the creeks, and the buildings.

And then I hit the hills. Little did I realize that drawing those tiny little lines in the proper scale and direction would prove so difficult. As you can see, I was far more successful in some cases than others. But I realized that even these fairly straightforward military campaign maps require a high technical skill as an artist. I nearly gave up when it came time to do the lettering (again, something that seems relatively simple).

It was a fun exercise though, and took a lot of time and attention to detail. For example none of my 64 colored pencils really matched some of the colors in the map. Particularly the red used in the Confederate positions proved difficult, and I ultimately had to use a brownish-orange which I then traced over with a red pencil. Similarly I used a normal pencil to lay a foundation for the Union positions which I then covered with a blue pencil. But, as you can see I made mistakes, and they aren’t that easy to erase!

It didn’t take long to realize the great advantages a program like Illustrator affords us in projects like this. For the second map I chose facsimile of Peter Charles L’Enfant’s plans for the District that was republished by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1887. It was a relatively large map, with most of it filled with empty city blocks, so I narrowed the area to the section many are most familiar with.

The map seemed really interesting to me because we get to see L’Enfant’s vision for the city and its uses. However, this particular version is difficult to approach—hard to read, partially drawn, poorly organized. So it seemed a perfect candidate to bring into the modern era. I decided to mostly stick to the color scheme used by L’Enfant, although I decided to make the city blocks filled rather than outlined. This seems to me a better way to visualize the space which is rarely vacant. I also added circles for the fountains and the monuments (note the monument at the east end where Lincoln Park is now-very interesting). Finally, I decided on Myriad which seemed an appropriately readable and modern font to fit the feel of the map.

Ultimately, I don’t think the Illustrator map was any less time consuming. However, I think the results are starkly different. My D.C. map is amateurish, but not nearly as much as the Gettysburg one. Again, the bar is lowered. Hope is offered. Plans can be laid.

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Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, edited by Anny Kelly Knowles is packed with provocative essays that offer a series of case studies about how m GIS, mapping, and plotting can be used to represent and convey historical information. The essays are intriguing in part because of their diversity, and the breadth of topics (from military to social history), geography (from Salem, MA to Rome, Italy), and time (from 1000 BC to the twentieth century) covered makes a strong case that historical mapping is an extremely flexible and useful research and educational tool.

While a number of them stood out for lending truly creative approaches to historical practices, Benjamin C. Ray’s “Teaching the Salem Witch Trials” in many ways captured the unique potential that mapping can offer. In the process of creating a digital library so that his students could examine primary materials related to Salem, Ray created a database of related metadata that, due to a grant requirement from the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (whose website contains some fascinating projects), included geolocation material.

Ray’s essay captures a great deal of the utility that geolocation offers historians. First, although his description is brief, he highlights the advantages that complex databases and computing offer in analyzing data. Gathering materials together is only a part of working through a historical problem. Computational databases offer an effective way of rendering research in ways that can foster the process of making sense of data. Allowing for multiple juxtapositions of individual data sets (such as geolocation with economic and religious concerns) can indicate connections which might not be readily apparent. As Ray shows, computing spatial (time and place) relations can be particularly illuminating.

Additionally, both Ray’s research and work in the classroom indicates that mapping data is good historical practice. He notes that while earlier scholarship about Salem employed maps, the precision of GIS as well as the ability to plot a multitude of data, allowed him to rethink some of the historical questions surrounding the trials. Ray’s maps not only contributed to the relevant scholarship of Salem, but also introduced students to important lessons about “doing history.” His essay argues strongly that mapping can be a vital part of scholarly best practices. But they also bring history alive in the classroom and give students an introductory access point to working through primary sources themselves.

“Teaching the Salem Witch Trials”, along with the other essays in Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, shows that maps can be taken beyond simple illustration and are more than gimmicks in the historian’s bag of tricks. Instead they are powerful analytical and teaching tools, and can be primary carriers of historical arguments rather than decorative illustrations.

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