rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Geovisual narratology
Part 3. Toward a humanities GIS
8. The terrae incognitae of humanities GIS
The geographer’s science and the storyteller’s art
Preface: Abstract Machine
Growing up, I was captivated by maps that accompanied pieces of fiction and the ways in which writers depicted actual and imagined places. In 2006,I was awarded a PhD for a thesis titled Lifeworlds: Literary Geographies in 1930s Ireland. My research examined how writers represented landscape, identity, and sense of place in Ireland during the early twentieth century. “Human geographers” as we conceive of them today did not exist during that period, so I employed writers as their proxies, informed by Ian G. Cook’s observation that geographers and:
the novelist have much in common. Both seek to portray the activities of people within the context of a specific milieu, infusing their descriptions of people and places with a sensitivity born of a rich and varied experience of life and society. Both seek to engender in their audience a deep awareness and empathy concerning others and their lebenswelt.1
My work was not a literary study per-se because it focused on phenomenology and the experience, perception, and representation of actual landscapes as captured through the prism of a writer’s imagination. However, I became aware of the power of writing techniques and the strong relationship between literature, history, and place. I was also exposed to critical theory, particularly Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, a time-space motif that acts as a historical and geographical knot to tie a piece of literature’s narrative strands together. At the time, I was teaching geographical information systems (GIS) in a graduate-level environmental science course and started to think about its convergences with literary approaches to place, in light of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s claim that “writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.”2 Deleuze and Guattari also propose, “when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into ... in order to work.”3 In the context of the digital humanities, I thought that GIS might be a type of “machine” with which to do this. The creation and genealogy of GIS also seemed to conform to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of other human-technological interfaces comprising the forms and functions of an abstract machine:
The double deterritorialization of the voice and the instrument is marked by a Wagner abstract machine, a Webern abstract machine, etc. In physics and mathematics, we may speak of a Riemann abstract machine and in algebra of a Galois abstract machine.4
Initially, the minimalist alliteration of point, polyline, and polygon-layer digital-mapping techniques employed in the abstract machine of a GIS did not captivate me. However, I soon began to consider whether Bakhtin’s time-space nodes, and the narrative strands they tie together in a piece of literature, could be “plugged” into such an abstract machine and then correlated with latitude and longitude coordinates to map the relationships between actual and imaginary locations in a writer’s depiction of place. Stuart Aitken and James Craine have observed that GIS acts not only as a technology of image making and communication but also as one of information transfer and knowledge production. They note that GIS comprises a chain of practices and processes through which users can gather geographical information and from it construct imaginative geographies.5 The prospect of using GIS for digital mapping, spatial modeling, and storytelling in the humanities thus became even more intriguing to me.
And this is where I mix my metaphors.
For years, I played a Fender Stratocaster, an electric guitar that revolutionized the blues, jazz, country music, and rock and roll. Scoring and recording music is by its nature a mathematical and creative process, and innovations in sound engineering, which set musical inspiration to flight, could not have been made possible without discoveries in the fields of physics and electronics.
Musical artists such as Philip Glass and Peter Gabriel and bands such as Pink Floyd and U2 also intrigued me because they artistically engaged technology to compose their landscapes of sound. I was particularly fascinated by David Bowie’s collaboration with Brian Eno, which produced the 1977 album Heroes. Bowie pointed out that the synthesizers used in the album had been designed by engineers, not musicians. The pair discarded their synthesizer manuals and simply played and experimented with the machines to create the sonic textures that shape their distinct soundscapes. This struck me as highly innovative in its simplicity and in turn influenced my own playful engagements and thoughts of employing GIS as a technology. Consequently, I follow a similarly idiosyncratic approach to historical, cultural, and literary GIS scholarship, in which I consult Esri tutorial manuals and then “critically play” with the software’s digital suite of tools while keeping the tropes of the humanities firmly in mind.
One way to consider this method is to think about how music is charted and performed. Melodies and rhythms are schematically diagrammed on the staves according to mathematical principles. However, when translated by a musician, these representations create sonic vibrations in space, which cross the threshold from the quantitative to the qualitative, creating an entire liminal space of performance and reception.
In many ways, GIS has become my Fender Stratocaster.
I believe that GIS scholarship in the arts and humanities will proliferate by conceiving and developing its own unique languages, tools, and methodologies. We can therefore reconceptualize the operations of GIS as a creative suite in which to play and perform various digital-mapmaking and spatial-modeling techniques. In Esri’s ArcGIS software, the ArcMap application constitutes a digital canvas upon which to plot abstracted layers of points, polylines, and polygons. The ArcCatalog application comprises a library platform from which the digital layers to create a map can be produced, borrowed, and returned. The animated mapping features of the ArcScene and ArcGlobe environments transform the possibilities for representing the dynamic relation between space and time in a cinematic manner, echoing Walter Benjamin’s observation, in 1936, of the ability of film “to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action ... with the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.”6 Indeed, “time-space GIS movies” draw on the emotional power of moving images to tell
