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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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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In examining the different atlases and maps this past week, a thought kept reoccurring that I haven’t quite been able to work through. There seems to be a significant difference between these historical atlases and text-based historical analysis, mainly in that the writing is more sparse in these visually based works. This makes sense since the primary sources are the focus of the works, but it made me question how historians approach these materials.

It seems as though often visual culture is presented on its own, as if they speak for themselves. This is not always the case obviously, but the narrative explanations often seem thinner than traditional approaches. There seem to be several possible reasons for this. One that I wonder about is whether as text continues to carry less and less weight in our culture, and is supplanted by different forms of imagery, is there a natural inclination to highlight the visual and constrain the text? The question that would follow for me though, is if this is the case, how can we continue to present complex interpretations of history through a combination of primary sources, imagery, and text in an appealing package?

The other point that struck me was it seems as though in assessing the maps presented in Historical Atlas of the United States historians can use visual source material to reform the narrative structure of their work. While Hayes chose to present his narrative in a chronological fashion, I wondered if it might not have made more sense for him to have used a topical approach. It seems that in comparing maps of a “political” or “patriotic” persuasion from different times and places might have been more useful that comparing maps simple from the same era with each other. I’m not sure if visual imagery lends itself to this sort of thematic analysis better than text sources, but it seems to be the case.

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Maps can provide interesting access points to the past. The information, presentation, and context of historical maps can indicate more that geographic locations. Instead they carry cultural attitudes and values, changing demographics, and contemporary political inclinations. In gathering historical maps together, topical themes can be traced over time and place, and much can be gleaned from their nuances and details.

Derek Hayes’ Historical Atlas of the United States and the David Rumsey Map Collection offer two efforts to utilize historical maps for research and education, but accomplish their similar goals through very different approaches. There is much to compare and contrast between the two projects, including the comparative selection of maps and historical context they are placed in. Mostly, however, it seems relevant to dissect the differences between the digital and traditional methods of publication of each. Historical Atlas of the United States is a traditional printed atlas, while the Rumsey Collection is an online archive. The collections have much in common, but it is in their differences that the different potential uses for maps begin to appear.

Perhaps because the book is still a more familiar device, the overall look and feel of Hayes’ work is more attractive than the website. Historical Atlas of the United States is a gorgeous book with beautiful reproductions, and it is very enjoyable to turn the pages and closely examine the maps. It is laid out well, with text woven between the maps, and helpful captions supporting both the analyses and the primary documents. This layout seems to be the greatest advantage of the traditional method of publication. With the book it is much easier to place maps in context with each other due to large size of the viewing area. It is difficult to effectively do this through a website as most users do not have computer monitors near the size of the large paged atlas. Similarly, the quality of color and resolution is under control in the printed format, whereas the website is again reliant on the technology of the user. With regard to these simple presentation aspects the book offers a superior experience.

Additionally, the book was far more efficient at delivering complementary text alongside the maps. With all of the relevant information&emdash;primary sources (maps), commentary (captions), and narrative text&emdash;readily available it offers a seamless experience. Alternatively, the Rumsey Collection struggles to coherently present all of the material related to the map. Large versions of the map appear in different windows than the metadata, forcing the user to flip back and forth between the two. This makes the natural inclination to refer from text to map and back a difficult task. This seems to be a simple design flaw, however, and an effect similar to the atlas could be accomplished digitally with better site structure.

Maybe not coincidentally, Historical Atlas of the United States offers better analysis and context for the maps than the Rumsey Collection. This might be a difference in approach. The Rumsey Collection functions more as an archive than a historical argument. It does seem possible though that the awkward presentation system inhibited the development of textual analysis or commentary on the website. Nonetheless, the maps on the Rumsey site offers little in the way of information beyond some metadata regarding the map’s origins and relations to other maps. Again, this is likely a function of the goals for the site, but it is hard to imagine it presenting a coherent and useful historical narrative as it is currently constructed.

This is not to say the digital medium does not have its advantages. The Rumsey site asserts, “Presenting individual maps in a digital format literally breaks the boundaries of an atlas’s bookbinding, allowing the viewer to view single maps independent of their original encasing.” And in presenting the primary sources the Rumsey Collection offers much more than Historical Atlas of the United States. Most importantly, the maps appearing on the website can be zoomed in on, allowing for a much closer examination of detail than the book. For example a map of AT&T trunk lines from 1891 appear in both the atlas and on the website. As highlighted in the images below, it is apparent that the maps on the website are far more useful for research and for getting a sense of the information the map is conveying. If one only was able to view the AT&T map in the atlas the towns and routes would be unclear. Instead, viewing it on the Rumsey site, questions arise regarding why certain towns were chosen to receive telephone and telegraph lines in the early telecommunications era.

The above image which is the general size of the one pictured in the atlas offers little insight into the detail of the map. However, as shown below, the website allows a much closer analysis of the map

Ultimately, there are a number of trade-offs in choosing a method to present historical atlases. It seems harder to present a coherent narrative digitally, though this might simply be that the goals and technology of the Rumsey Collection are not congruous with such a project. However, the flexibility and precision the digital maps offer is a major advantage in developing a collection of maps for comparison and analysis.

A final advantage of the digital format that is not present in the Rumsey Collection, but bears mentioning, is the potential for creative uses of maps it offers. The photo sharing site Flickr contains a number of groups dedicated to historical cartography, including one called Memory Maps. While these are not strictly historical atlases, they do contain maps of a historical bent. The group description describes, “The idea is to take a satelitte image of your neighborhood from your childhood, and use “notes” to tell the story of you growing up.” In transforming maps of familiar areas, users are creating items which will speak to future historians, as well as create a usable record of the near past for current scholars. Here we can begin to further explore the way maps can be infused with narratives similar to the ones presented in both Hayes’ and Rumsey’s collections.

As one user notes, “So if memories are an expression of historical remberances, how is it possible to use current maps to express the temporal quality of those memories?” It is an interesting thought to keep in mind while examining maps of eras past. As both Hayes and Rumsey show, maps are far more than simple geographic representations. And as their projects exemplify, there are different ways we can come to know and understand maps more deeply and begin to unravel their meanings.

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Reading Lee Anne Ghajar’s post about the interpretational aspects of cartography reminded me of something I came across a few months back. You ask, “But is a satellite view of the earth subject to the same interpretive categories as the first maps of new continents?” I would answer probably not, although I’m sure we could stretch and find some points about which side of the earth is the picture and its orientation. Regardless the flip side of the question, about how we can add value to maps seems more interesting.

A few months back I came across a site called Worldmapper. Their tagline is “The world as you’ve never seen it before.” And it’s true. Take for example the two images below.

The first image represents the territory size in proportion to the number of botanical gardens found in that area. The second image does the same but for the number of plant species. So here they have taken maps and given them unique representations with two somewhat related sets of data. The disparity between the two is amazing. Moreover, it makes one quickly realize how maps can be instilled deeply with both useful and loaded information. This seems important for us to remember moving forward in class since, as Lee Anne notes, “… historical maps are necessarily objects that must be interpreted.”

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Looking at the articles by James Paul Gee and Niall Ferguson, as well as playing MYST III, it seems we might be witnessing a paradigm shift in the model of education. The trends away from simple textual based learning, as well as the mammoth advances in computer science over the past two decades have led to the entrance of video games into the classroom. However, the enthusiasm is far from universal, especially for those who generally do not equate learning with fun.

As Gee offers in the conclusion of “Learning by Design,” “When we think of games, we think of fun. When we think of learning we think of work. Games show us this is wrong.” Gee examines the underlying lessons that many non-educational games can offer its users such as strategic thinking in specific contexts. What he is essentially arguing is that their is a model of learning embedded in games, and that it is often far more effective than ones found in the classroom precisely because its users enjoy using the material and as such get more out of it.

To an extent MYST tries to bridge the gap between tradition and the new in its structure. While there is a certain fetishization of textual forms in the game (in the use of books as the mechanisms of time travel, as well as the high amount of reading required for a video game), most of the game revolves around following visual clues to solve puzzles. While I found the clues too disconnected and obtuse to make the game enjoyable (and thus a useful learning experience), I imagine others could have an immersive, challenging, and pleasant experience. In this sense MYST may meet Gee’s requirements for a useful educational game. What would be interesting would be translating a game like MYST into a historical context. Perhaps something along the lines of Tomb Raider, with players hoping to unlock the secrets of the Valley of the Kings, but based on the work of Howard Carter, rather than some ahistorical model. Then users would be learning both the abstract lessons Gee finds video games are most effective at conveying, as well as the historical content Ferguson thinks can make them educational tools.

What is likely most important to remember in all of this, it is that video games are becoming central to the experiences of children today whether we like it or not. As Niall Ferguson writes of the current school-age generation, “And, as they seek a deeper understanding of the world we live in, they
may not turn first to the bookshelves. They may demand to play—or
rather replay—the great game of history for themselves.” Rather than decrying this as a negative development, it seems more useful to attempt to understand the games they play and think creatively about how games and the their principles can be incorporated into a positive learning experience.

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My site is going to be pretty image heavy, and I wanted to find away to annotate the images and analyze them. The ideal method would be to figure out a way to pull in images from my flickr page and utilize its note adding capapbilities. However, this involves understanding API’s and all sorts of coding that is way, way out of my league.

So I settled on a method using CSS that I found at CSSplay. After tinkering with the code a little bit, I really liked the results I got. You can see it here. I’s love for some feedback!

Unfortunately, my notation does not appear in IE6. The author, Stu Nicholls, claims, and demonstrates, that this method should work. So something must have gone awry when I hacked his code up a little to make it suit my site better. Fortunately, Nicholls has a few other examples available, and hopefully I will either be able to fix the first method or use one of these successfully.

I offered some appreciation and suggestions for Steve, Mark this week.

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