Historiarum

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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