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!

Share This

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?

Share This

On Tad

On Misha

Share This

Jeremy Black’s Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past covers a lot of ground in its two hundred pages. Black assesses a great deal of the history of mapmaking, historical or otherwise, stretching back to China in 2100 BC. However, much of his work focuses on, or tangentially nods toward the role of maps in nation building. Black indicates these ideas early, commenting on a twelfth century Chinese atlas, “This work, apparently the oldest printed historical atlas, is fascination because it reveals that from the outset the selection of maps and presentation of material in historical atlases involved issues of politics and propaganda.”(2) He goes on to successfully trace this idea across time and place. For example the importance of territory demarcation among imperial European maps, the ethnographic works of Nazi Germany, or Soviet highlights of industrial and technological growth under Communism. (66, 126, 157)

Interestingly, many of the atlases Black examines were created for use in schools. This emphasizes that maps are not simply referential documents, despite their placement in most library stacks. Rather maps are also instructive, directing the readers attention to certain characteristics and creating narratives by omitting others. While it is important to use a critical and even skeptical eye when examining maps, this is not necessarily a flaw in maps as a medium. Instead, it means that they are more like texts than we imagine. While there has in recent years been a greater effort to include images among other historical evidence, there seems no reason why they should be limited to just this use. In creating historical maps we can also impart meaning beyond the visual representation of place. They can become paragraphs, and atlases essays or books. This is exciting to think about with regards to our final projects, which can potentially make complex historical arguments through images rather than texts.

For example, Black mentioned an innovative mapmaker from the middle of the twentieth century, Richard Edes Harrison.(230) Harrison was known for making birds-eye view maps, a concept I didn’t quite understand until I saw an example (there were none in the book-this was my one complaint with Maps and History, not enough maps!). Here you can see the unique perspective Harrison created by turning the map on its side, almost giving the viewer the feeling of looking at a globe.

See the original

However, another map of Harrison’s really caught my eye. “The world according to Standard” presents a fascinating depiction of trade routes, energy consumption, American colonial exploits, and diplomacy. The tagline accompanying the map reads, “How a great oil company works in time of peace and how the war is affecting it.” As Black notes in Maps and History, “If the self-referential sections of historical atlases can be self-reverential, they are, nevertheless, crucial to the assessment of the visual message of the maps.”(66) While I think Black unnecessarily privileges text in his assessment of atlas introductions, it is clear that they they serve an extremely useful and powerful narrative function. The one line situated just below the Standard Oil map sets the stage for the entire image, with Standard set as a great world power on whom even entire countries, especially the prominently featured United States, rely. Not only does this map illustrate how maps can by imparted with large amounts of explicit and implicit meaning, it also shows how a few words can wield much greater power when coupled with images.

See the original

Share This

New words catch my eye in nearly everything I read, but often I’ve forgotten them shortly after examining their definitions, since generally speaking there is either little opportunity to use them or they are words with no real distinction from other words or phrases except to make the author seem more intelligent than he or she really is. Jargon has its place, but I find it all too regularly used as a crutch for the author and an impediment for the reader. Essentially if we want to reach an audience outside of the discipline, it should be used sparingly at most.

Reading John Lewis Gaddis’s The Landscape of History this week was my first encounter with the word consilience and it seems to me to fill a gap in our vocabulary. Certainly it qualifies as jargon, since its usage is essentially only relevant to academic disciplines. It is not specific to any one discipline, however, but instead is a term that spans all of the disciplines, which I find more useful. Gaddis quotes two definitions of consilience: “unexpected coincidences of results drawn from distant parts of a subject” and “a way of asking whether, in the gathering of disciplines, specialists can ever reach agreement on a common body of abstract principles and evidentiary proof.”(49) Barring the final chapter (in which Gaddis waffles on the ultimate value of history while setting up some arguably false and created ambiguities of historical research), the rest of his book operates with consilience as the as the basis from which he draws comparisons between historical and scientific methods, finding utility in some and fault with others.

These metaphors he drew with disciplines such as astronomy and biology were particularly useful in thinking about what historians do, and how it is done. Gaddis highlighted cartography largely as a vehicle to show the impossibility of true representation, as well as the arbitrary, but importance of decisions made by the representers. This is a familiar idea to many students of history, but an important one to keep in mind. More to the point, for a class such as this one which combines the disciplines of history and cartography it seems greatly important since we will be dealing with a mode of representation which we are familiar with in very limited senses as users, and almost wholly unfamiliar with creatively. History has usually been represented via words and text. Images are secondary. But the other part of Gaddis’s argument, that much can be gleaned from examining other disciplines can be put to work here.

Rather than setting history apart from other disciplines and holing up in our own methods and practices, it seems better to look at how other disciplines approach problems, and how they render conclusions, and what we might recognize, borrow, or discard from them. Maps have always held a place in historical analysis, but often in a very limited sense. By thinking about their potential and looking at the process of cartography, perhaps we can explore new approaches to historical research and representation.

Share This