The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship

The Spatial Humanities

SPATIAL HUMANITIES

David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, editors

The spatial humanities is a new interdisciplinary field resulting from the recent surge of scholarly interest in space. It prospects a ground upon which humanities scholars can collaborate with investigators engaged in scientific and quantitatively-oriented research. This spatial turn invites an initiative focused on geographic and conceptual space and is poised to exploit an assortment of technologies, especially in the area of the digital humanities. Framed by perspectives drawn from Geographic Information Science, and attentive to cutting-edge developments in data mining, the geo-semantic Web, and the visual display of cultural data, the agenda of the spatial humanities includes the pursuit of theory, methods, case studies, applied technology, broad narratives, persuasive strategies, and the bridging of research fields. The series is intended to bring the best scholarship in spatial humanities to academic and lay audiences, in both introductory and advanced forms, and in connection with Web-based electronic supplements to and extensions of book publication.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Edward L. Ayers, University of Richmond, USA

Peter Bol, Harvard University, USA

Peter Doorn, DANS, Netherlands

I-chun Fan, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Michael Goodchild, University of California-Santa Barbara, USA

Yuzuru Isoda, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan

Kim Knott, University of Leeds, UK

Anne Knowles, Middlebury College, USA

Andreas Kunz, Institute of European History (Mainz), Germany

Lewis Lancaster, University of California-Berkeley, USA

Gary Lock, University of Oxford, UK

Barney Warf, Kansas University, USA

May Yuan, Oklahoma University, USA

The Spatial Humanities

GIS AND THE FUTURE OF

HUMANITIES SCHOLARSHIP

EDITED BY

David J. Bodenhamer

John Corrigan

Trevor M. Harris

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington & Indianapolis

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The spatial humanities : GIS and the future of humanities scholarship / edited by David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris.

p. cm. — (Spatial humanities)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35505-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22217-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Geographic information systems—Social aspects. 2. Human geography. 3. Humanities—Social aspects. 4. Humanities—Social aspects—Methodology. 5. Memory—Social aspects. 6. Learning and scholarship—Technological innovations. I. Bodenhamer, David J. II. Corrigan, John. III. Harris, Trevor.

G70.212.S654 2010

001.30285—dc22

2009053214

1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10

Contents

• Introduction

1 Turning toward Place, Space, and Time

Edward L. Ayers

2 The Potential of Spatial Humanities

David J. Bodenhamer

3 Geographic Information Science and Spatial Analysis for the Humanities

Karen K. Kemp

4 Exploiting Time and Space: A Challenge for GIS in the Digital Humanities

Ian Gregory

5 Qualitative GIS and Emergent Semantics

John Corrigan

6 Representations of Space and Place in the Humanities

Gary Lock

7 Mapping Text

May Yuan

8 The Geospatial Semantic Web, Pareto GIS, and the Humanities

Trevor M. Harris, L. Jesse Rouse, and Susan Bergeron

9 GIS, e-Science, and the Humanities Grid

Paul S. Ell

10 Challenges for the Spatial Humanities: Toward a Research Agenda

Trevor M. Harris, John Corrigan, and David J. Bodenhamer

• Suggestions for Further Reading

• List of Contributors

• Index

Introduction

This book proposes the development of spatial humanities that promises to revitalize and redefine scholarship by (re)introducing geographic concepts of space to the humanities. Humanists are fully conversant with space as concept or metaphor—gendered space, the body as space, and racialized space, among numerous other rubrics, are common frames of reference and interpretation in many disciplines—but only recently have scholars revived what had been a dormant interest in the influence of physical or geographical space on human behavior and cultural development. This renewal of interest stems in large measure from the ubiquity of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in contemporary society. From online mapping and personal navigation devices to election night maps colored in red and blue, we are more aware than ever of the power of the map to facilitate commerce, enable knowledge discovery, or make geographic information visual and socially relevant.

GIS lies at the heart of this so-called spatial turn. At its core, GIS is a powerful software that uses location to integrate and visualize information. Within a GIS, users can discover relationships that make a complex world more immediately understandable by visually detecting spatial patterns that remain hidden in texts and tables. Maps have served this function for a long time: the classic example occurred in the 1850s when an English doctor, John Snow, mapped an outbreak of cholera and saw how cases clustered in a neighborhood with a well that, unknown to residents, was contaminated. Not only does GIS bring impressive computing power to this task, but it is capable of integrating data from different formats by virtue of their shared geography. This ability has attracted considerable interest from historians, archaeologists, linguists, students of material culture, and others who are interested in place, the dense coil of memory, artifact, and experience that exists in a particular space, as well as in the coincidence and movements of people, goods, and ideas that have occurred across time in spaces large and small. Recent years have witnessed the wide application of GIS to historical and cultural questions: did the Dust Bowl of the 1930s result from over-farming the land or was it primarily the consequence of long term environmental changes? What influence did the rapidly changing cityscape of London have on literature in Elizabethan England? What was the relationship between rulers and territory in the checkered political landscape of state formation in nineteenth-century Germany? How did spatial networks influence the administrative geography of medieval China? Increasingly, scholars are turning to GIS to provide new perspective on these and other topics that previously have been studied outside of an explicitly spatial framework.

Spatial humanities, especially with a humanities-friendly GIS at its center, can be a tool with revolutionary potential for scholarship, but as such, it faces significant obstacles at the outset. The term humanities GIS sounds like an oxymoron both to humanists and to GIS experts. It links two approaches to knowledge that, at first glance, rest on different epistemological footings. Humanities scholars speak often of conceptual and cognitive mapping, but view geographic mapping, the stock in trade of GIS, as an elementary or primitive approach to complexity at best or environmental determinism at worst. Experts in spatial technologies, conversely, have found it difficult to wrestle slippery humanities notions into software that demands precise locations and closed polygons. At times, applying GIS to the humanities appears only to prove C. P. Snow’s now-classic formulation of science and the humanities as two separate worlds.

One of the problems, perhaps the basic problem, is that GIS was not developed for the humanities. It emerged first as a tool of the environmental sciences. Oriented initially around points, lines, and polygons, it found quick acceptance in the corporate world and, with its close cousin, GPS, spawned a host of location-based services. Its uptake in the academy was slower, although by the 1980s it was possible to speak of a spatial turn, a re-emergence of space and place as important concepts in the social sciences, driven in large measure by GIS and other spatial technologies. Humanities too experienced a spatial turn—and a temporal turn in the New Historicism—but its spaces and places were metaphorical rather than geographical constructions. Although GIS has gained a small foothold in specialty areas such as historical GIS, the technology that drove a social science agenda for two decades had little salience for humanists, who saw scant potential in it for answering the questions that interested them.

Significantly, the discipline that provided the home for much GIS development and application, geography, found itself divided over the technology in ways that mimicked the concerns expressed by humanists about quantitative methods generally. The central issue was, at heart, epistemological: GIS privileged a certain way of knowing the world, one that valued authority, definition, and certainty over complexity, ambiguity, multiplicity, and contingency, the very things that engaged humanists. From this internal debate, often termed Critical GIS, came a new approach, GIS and Society, which sought to reposition GIS as GIScience, embodying it with a theoretical framework that it previously lacked. This intellectual restructuring pushed the technology in new directions that were more suitable to the humanities. The aim of this book is to seize the momentum generated by the long debate in geography and use it to advance an even more radical conception of GIS that will reorient, and perhaps revolutionize, humanities scholarship.

The power of GIS for the humanities lies in its ability to integrate information from a common location, regardless of format, and to visualize the results in combinations of transparent layers on a map of the geography shared by the data. Internet mapping has made this concept widely recognized and accessible, but this use of GIS only hints at its potential for the humanities. Scholars now have the tools to link quantitative, qualitative, and image data and to view them simultaneously and in relationship with each other in the spaces where they occur. But the technology currently requires that humanists fit their questions, data, and methods to the rigid parameters of the software, which implicitly are based on positivist assumptions about the world. We seek instead to conceptualize spatial humanities by critically engaging the technology and directing it to the subject matter of the humanities, taking what GIS offers in the way of tools while at the same time urging new agendas upon GIS that will shape it for richer collaborative engagements with the humanistic disciplines. It will not be sufficient for the humanities to draw piecemeal from the vocabulary of spatial analysis redolent in GIS or simply to adapt the current state of GIS technology to specific research. Rather, genuine advancement of scholarly investigation of space in the humanities will derive from investigators’ successes in effecting a profound blending of research languages and in organizing sustained collaborative experimentation with spatially aware interpretation.

To date, studies using GIS in historical and cultural studies have been disparate, application driven, and often tied to the somewhat more obvious use of GIS in census boundary delineation and map making. While not seeking to minimize the importance of such work, these studies have rarely addressed the broader, more fundamental issues that surround the introduction of a spatial technology such as GIS into the humanities. There are core reasons why GIS has found early use and ready acceptance in the sciences and social sciences rather than in the more qualitatively based humanities. The humanities pose far greater epistemological and ontological issues that challenge the technology in a number of ways, from the imprecision and uncertainty of data to concepts of relative space, the use of time as an organizing principle, and the mutually constitutive relationship between time and space. Essentially, GIS and its related technologies currently allow users to determine a geography of space. In the context of the humanities, we seek to move GIS from this more limited quantitative representation of space to facilitate an understanding of place within time and the role that place occupies in humanities disciplines.

Seeking to fuse GIS with the humanities is challenging in the extreme. GIS is a technology that generates geometric abstractions of the real world that can be mathematically integrated to provide a powerful spatial analytic system. Such a positivist science sits uncomfortably with the varied philosophical and methodological approaches traditionally pursued in the humanities. The qualitative-based humanities are problematic for a quantitative technology. Quantitative representations of space fit more comfortably with the sciences and social sciences than they do with qualitatively based humanities. GIS is spatially deterministic and requires landscapes and societal patterns and processes to be tied to the spatial geometrical primitives of point, line, polygon, and pixel. The mathematical topology that underpins GIS brings its own data representations in the form of raster, vector, and object forms. The attribution of these geometric forms lends itself to the classifications of natural resources, infrastructure, demography, and environmental phenomena rather than to the less well-defined descriptive terms and categories of the humanities. Spatio-temporal GIS, or the ability of GIS to handle space and time concurrently, also remains unresolved, which makes current technology difficult for time-based humanities studies. Data and the representations of phenomena, then, are singular factors that challenge the fusion of GIS with the humanities. Yet the GIS abstractions of space, nature, and society, while posing substantial problems, are particularly relevant in the humanities where notions and representations of place, rather than those of space, are primary. To this end, GIScientists have made recent advances in spatial multimedia, in GIS-enabled Web services, geovisualization, cyber geography, exploratory spatial data analysis, and virtual reality that provide capabilities far exceeding the abilities of GIS on its own. Together, these technologies have the potential to revolutionize the role of place in the humanities by moving beyond the two-dimensional map to explore dynamic representations and interactive systems that will prompt an experiential, as well as rational, knowledge base.

This notion of a richer, dynamic, and experiential GIS resonates with the evocative and thick descriptions of place and time that humanists have long favored in their scholarship. Even mapping itself comports well with the aims and methods of humanists. Representation of the past, suggests historian John Lewis Gaddis, is a kind of mapping where the past is a landscape and history is the way we fashion it. The metaphor, one consistent with disciplinary traditions across the humanities, makes the link between pattern recognition as the primary form of human perception and the fact that all history … draws upon the recognition of such patterns.¹ In this sense, mapping is not cartographic but conceptual. It permits varying levels of detail, not just as a reflection of scale but also of what is known at the time. Like the map, history becomes better and more accurate as we continue to accumulate more detail, observe its patterns, and refine our knowledge.

This conception of history may be applied to the humanities more generally. Humanists, as the term implies, study the human condition in all its variety. The various disciplines in the humanities have their own traditions, of course, but collectively they would agree that their aim is to present a reasoned argument about the known past that allows us to learn who we are and what we may become as individuals, groups, and societies. This inquiry is part of our nature as humans, but it comes fraught with difficulties. The past, of course, is irretrievable, which is why historians draw a sharp distinction between it and the arguments or lessons we derive from it. We understand the past’s value: it is our source of evidence; without it, we would know nothing or have any sense of who we are. But the past escapes us as soon as it becomes past. We cannot recapture it; we can only represent it. In representing the past, we seek perspective, the point of view that allows us to discern patterns among the events that have occurred. We are not trying to transmit accumulated knowledge—culture and tradition do this, among other means—but to understand the significance of our experience.

In their essence, humanities disciplines seek to generalize from the particular, not for the purpose of finding universal laws but rather to glean insights about cause and effect from a known outcome. Here, the humanities differ from much social science, which attempts to reach a generalization that holds true in any similar circumstance. This difference is significant and influences the way the two groups of scholars create knowledge. For many social scientists, the search for trustworthy generalization focuses on the isolation of an independent variable, the cause that has a predictable effect on dependent variables or ones that respond to the stimulus or presence of a catalyst. They believe it is possible to discover such a variable, given sufficient resources, because the world is not yet lost to them. Humanists must contend with fragmentary evidence and are painfully aware that the past is incomplete and irretrievable. They also are skeptical of prediction. The past is fixed, even if its interpretation is not: in it the intersection of patterns and singular events can be discovered. Not so in the future, where continuities and contingencies coexist independently of one another. Humanists view reality as web-like, to use philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s phrase, because they see everything as related in some way to everything else. Interdependency is the lingua franca of the humanities.

Humanists seek to portray a world that is lost for the purpose of answering questions that bear on human experience as we perceive it today. The humanities scholar’s goal is not to model or replicate the past; a model implies the working out of dependent and independent variables for purposes of prediction, whereas replication suggests the ability to know the past and its cultural forms more completely than most humanists would acknowledge is possible. Humanists, in a sense, are abstractionists: they have the capacity for selectivity, simultaneity, and the shifting of scale in pursuit of the fullest possible understanding of heritage and culture. Traditionally, humanities scholars have used narrative to construct the portrait that furthers this objective. Narrative encourages the interweaving of evidentiary threads and permits the scholar to qualify, highlight, or subdue any thread or set of them—to use emphasis, nuance, and other literary devices to achieve the complex construction of past worlds. All of these elements—interdependency, narrative, and nuance, among others—predispose the humanists to look askance at any method or tool that appears to reduce complex events to simple schemes. The computer, of course, is a technology that does not tolerate ambiguity, expressing all matter as zeroes and ones and demanding mutually exclusive categories in its data structures. Its insistence on precision does not fit the world-view of humanities scholars; indeed, these disciplines appear at times to embrace an uncertainty principle—the more precisely you measure one variable, the less precise are other variables.

It is no accident that humanists have embraced eclectic methods as fervently as they resist anything that smacks of reductionism. Questions drive humanities scholarship, not hypotheses, and the questions that matter most address causation: why matters more than whom, what, or when, even though these latter questions are neither trivial nor easy to answer. The research goal is not to eliminate explanations or to disprove the hypothesis but to open the inquiry through whatever means are available and by whatever evidence may be found. A well-presented argument often does not settle a question; it may complicate it or open new questions that previously were unimagined. Similarly, humanists are hard-pressed to identify a preferred method because each avenue of investigation yields different evidence and thus different insights. We revisit evidence as we discover new data. Our approach is recursive, not linear: our goal is not so much to eliminate answers as to admit new perspectives. The evidence we use, even if fraudulent, is rarely discarded because it may answer another question: the data may be false but it also raises the question of why it exists and what significance does it have on an understanding of human behavior. Our approach to problems doubtless appears quixotic to nonhumanists because it does not lead to finality. But for humanists, the goal is not proof but meaning. The challenge, then, for humanities GIS is to use technology to probe, explore, challenge, and complicate, in sum, to allow us to see, experience, and understand human behavior in all its complexity. As in traditional humanities scholarship, the goal is less to produce an authoritative or ultimate answer than to prompt new questions, develop new perspectives, and advance new arguments or interpretations.

How we do this is one of the large aims of this book. The authors— three historians, a religionist, an archaeologist, and four geographers: three scholars from the UK, five from the U.S.—were participants in an expert workshop held in June 2008 at The Polis Center, a research unit of the IU School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Held under the aegis of the Virtual Center for Spatial Humanities, a partnership among Florida State University, West Virginia University, and IUPUI, the sessions sought to develop an interdisciplinary framework and language for a spatial and visual approach to the humanities, as well as identify the potential of GIS and GIScience to contribute meaningfully to humanities scholarship. Working from papers prepared in advance and revised for this volume, the participants grappled with theories and technologies, concepts and critiques, potential and practicalities. These chapters represent different sorts of queries about what currently is possible in exploring space in the humanities and about where promising frontiers are opening, especially in terms of our ability to adapt technology to new ends. It is our hope that they provoke creative thinking about how the technology that organizes knowledge on the Web and renders space visually in GIS can be shaped in ways that better accommodate the methods and approaches of the humanities, leading to broader and deeper collaboration between humanists and geographical information scientists.

What resulted from the workshop were the chapters in this book, as well as the beginnings of an agenda for research that will test what we discussed against major questions of interest to humanists. The essays that follow grapple with problems—how to create a language that bridges disciplines, how to re-conceptualize the humanities to include spatial perspectives, how to use GIS to analyze texts and images as well as it parses points and polygons—and suggest approaches toward a robust spatial humanities. From deep