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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