offer a kinetic visual experience more characteristic with the tropes of modernity to transform the possibilities for representing space in GIS.7
As a visualization tool most strongly associated with the discipline of geography (translated from the Greek for “earth writing”), we can conceptualize a humanities GIS model as an electronic stylus and digital cuneiform to inscribe spatial language and symbols. Such a model resurrects the practice of geographia from its ancient Greek and Roman roots, when the discipline constituted a literary genre more so than a branch of physical science.8 When I teach GIS, I tell my students that to become proficient, they must practice their craft, just as if they were learning to play a piano, a saxophone, or a Fender Stratocaster. By approaching the “science” of GIS as an “art” form, humanities students can creatively play and experiment with its toolkit to translate its approaches for their own research and fields of study. This book offers a few creative examples of humanities GIS models, but the budding geospatial John Coltranes, Pablo Picassos, and Georgia O’Keefes are out there somewhere. I hope this book provides them with some inspiration.
Sources
1 I. G. Cook, “Consciousness and the Novel: Fact or Fiction in the Works of D. H. Lawrence,” in Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place, ed. D. C. Pocock (New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981), 66.
2 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), 4–5.
3 Ibid., 4.
4 Ibid., 141–42.
5 S. Aitken and J. Craine, “Affective Geographies and GIScience,” Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach, ed. M. Cope and S. Elwood (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2009), 141.
6 W. Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 229.
7 M.-P. Kwan, “Affecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion,” The Professional Geographer, 59, no. 1 (2007): 22–34; D. Cosgrove, “Maps, Mapping, Modernity: Art and Cartography in the Twentieth Century,” Imagi Mundi, 57, no. 1 (2005): 35–54.
8 J. S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3–4.
Acknowledgments
I would like to recognize the influence and encouragement of the following individuals: Professors Poul Holm, Anne Buttimer, Gunnar Olsson, Jane Ohlmeyer, David Nemeth, David Bodenhamer, Ian Gregory, Kevin Archer, and Stephen Reader; Drs. David Drew, Alexander von Lünen, Mary Gilmartin, Mark Hennessy, Stephen McCarron, Kieran Rankin, Krysia Rybaczuk, and Francis Ludlow; the poet Brendan Kenneally; and Gabriel García Márquez. I am grateful to Jo D’Arcy; Eadaoin Clarke and the Clarke family; Walter Price; my late father, Professor Charles Travis; my mother Kathleen Glavin Travis; and the Trinity Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin. I want to acknowledge Esri Press for shepherding the manuscript to production. I want to thank David Bowie, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, and the members of U2 for lessons in how creativity can bloom from the most unexpected places.
Chapter 1
Introduction
Figure 1.1 The Lascaux Cave paintings (Hall of Bulls). Photo courtesy of Jack Versloot (http://flickr.com/photos/80749232@N00).
From Lascaux to the Sea of Tranquility
The series of Paleolithic paintings of humans, animals, and cryptic signs that adorn the stone walls of the Lascaux cave complex in southwestern France (figure 1.1) bestow on humanity a 20,000-year-old tableau that we can appreciate, in an ontological sense, as one of the earliest humanities GIS models ever created. To literal minds, the images perhaps represent no more than the esoteric daubs of our ancestors huddled in fear around a primordial fire. To imaginative minds, however, the creative use of pigments, derived from local flora and fauna, illustrates a prehistoric knack for storytelling, artistry, and technological prowess. Indeed, these cave paintings, because they unambiguously plot the human-environmental interactions of hunter-gatherers, act as a primal GIS created to convey the “spatial stories” of a nomadic people still in thrall to the great myths and mysteries of the universe.
Fast-forward to the late twentieth century. We see Homo sapiens chart the solar system and navigate an Apollo rocket and lunar module to the Sea of Tranquility on the surface of the moon. Through its portal, we gaze back on an earthrise from the module’s hi-tech cave. Now we cue the spool of history to the present to witness the digital revolution creating waves that ripple through the sciences, arts, and humanities. Amidst this great change, words such as mapping have emerged as important metaphors. In the arts and humanities, scholars navigate texts and explore the spatial and geographical dimensions of literary, cultural, and historical works.1 Indeed, these spatial and cultural turns reveal that there are still many regions of terrae incognitae left to explore and map.
Drawing on tropes in the spatial and digital humanities, literary theory, and critical thought, this book illustrates how geographers can model and apply GIS techniques typically employed in the natural and social sciences to literary, cultural, and historical studies. This book takes the view that a humanities GIS model provides a discursive and artistic platform that we can use to visualize and spatialize stories and plot conventional empirical narratives. In addition, GIS can also be employed to perform ergodic and deformative interpretive mappings of literary, cultural, and historical works; create innovative, interactive digital texts; and foster insightful mapping experiences. This book targets students, researchers, and academics engaged in the digital humanities and anyone interested in how location, place, and space can illuminate their respective area of study.
What is a GIS?
For centuries, maps were sketched painstakingly by hand with materials such as ink, papyrus, sheepskin, parchment, and paper. The transition from traditional forms of mapmaking to interactive, digital mapping platforms, such as GIS, began in the late twentieth century. In our age, geocoded digital images proliferate, conjured on plasma screens by fingertip strokes on cybernetic keyboards that parse signals from earth-orbiting satellites. In the 1970s, computer mapping introduced the first digital maps and automated the drafting process from the sketching table to the computer screen. In the 1980s, electronic database systems linked to digital maps, which allowed the visual display of multidimensional data variables and provided the foundation for many GIS systems operating today.
A geographic information system, or GIS, provides a digital platform upon which multiple map layers (called shapefiles and rasters) electronically stack on top of each other to create composite images. Each shapefile layer and its attendant data table display unique variables (represented as points, polylines, and polygons). Layers can also be composed of a pixelated terrain or map images called rasters. The GIS operator digitally manipulates the order of the stacked layers and associated data tables, creating any number of connections between the spatialized variables to produce composite mappings, visual representations, and spatial models for analysis.
GIS
