Space, Connections, and Place in the First Global Age

Author(s): J. B. Owens
Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1, Special Fortieth Anniversary Issue
(Spring, 2009), pp. 190-192
Published by: Sixteenth Century Journal
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40541143
Accessed: 07-06-2016 15:39 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Sixteenth Century Journal

This content downloaded from 132.178.94.23 on Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:39:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
190 Sixteenth Century Journal XL/1 (2009)

repositioning history at the center of intellectual society - a position it has not

enjoyed since the early 1970s, but where we all, in our hearts, believe it belongs. c&

1969 % 2009

Space, Connections, and Place in the First Global Age

/. B. Owens
Idaho State University

Toward the end of the fall semester, 1966, my first in the graduate program, I was
sitting at the head of a stairway in Bascom Hall, which was then home to the Uni-
versity of Wisconsins History Department. I had sought sanctuary before continu-
ing my long, cold march from a class in "Ag Hall" to the library. Somehow, Bob
Kingdon, whom I had never met, identified me in the ebb and flow of hundreds of
students swirling through that overcrowded space. He asked if I had time to talk to
him about my research interests, and within about an hour he had launched me on
an intellectual journey that I continue in my research and in teaching courses such
as "Renaissance Creativity." I could not be more grateful to him for stimulating the
work of a student outside his research seminar.
Before that fateful meeting, I had just read the first edition of Fernand Brau-
del's massive, geographically integrated history of the Mediterranean, and I had
vague ideas about research on the way that the history of a place was shaped by its
connections to other places. Because my adviser, Domenico Sella, was spending
the year in Italy, Bob took the role of steering me toward a workable MA project.
Because I was incensed by the lack of rigor in reified, essentialist, nationalist his-
tories of the diffusion of ideas during the Renaissance, he suggested that I make
use of the massive collection of published documents about the printing industry
in Lyon as a way to deal with the issue of how innovative ideas developed in North-
ern Italy were diffused within France and other markets served by Lyonnese print-
ers and merchant-publishers.
In response, I produced a thesis in which I traced through qualitative data and
methods the complex social networks that connected Lyons printers, editors, and
writers among themselves and with Northern Italy. The readers found it hard to
follow all of the threads within a linear text, and one suggested that I produce some
sort of chart. I failed to create anything satisfactory because a static chart did not
serve as an adequate vehicle for organizing overlapping, dynamic, networked
interactions among a large number of people over the sixty-year period I studied.
The effort to produce some helpful visualization frustrated me as well because,
although I did not then know the concept, the dynamics of the system of which
these social networks were a part was quite nonlinear.
Because the meaning of no document can be understood without grasping
how the ideas and actions recorded there were connected to other ideas and
actions, and the history of no place can be told without taking into account how it
has been connected to other places, future innovative research will take advantage

This content downloaded from 132.178.94.23 on Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:39:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Future of Sixteenth Century Studies 1 9 1

of conceptual and information management tools that were unavailable to me in

the 1960s to deal more effectively with the complexity of the historical reality we
try to understand. Moreover, because obtaining the necessary information about
all of the connections, especially at the level of world history, will exceed the capa-
bilities of an individual researcher, historians will collaborate in team projects that
will often be multidisciplinary and multinational.
Historians will deal with connections and social networks within geographic
spaces of varying scales, from the household and neighborhood to the world, and
with the interactions of humans with their material, built, and natural environ-
ments. Their questions will become more spatial in nature while retaining the dis-
cipline's focus on process through time and narrative (for example, how the
connections among geographic places influence gender roles within the linked
locations). In order to manage such complicated research and teaching programs,
an increasingly higher percentage of historians will use geographic information
systems (GIS). GIS and related technologies are ubiquitous in our lives but are lit-
tle known by historians. GIS permits researchers to aggregate and integrate com-
plex information (tabular data, digital documents, images, multimedia,
visualizations, historic cartography, interactive content, etc.) on the basis of geo-
graphic location and to track the movements of people, products, ideas, and inno-
vations from place to place, and it allows rapid searches for the information
needed to respond to historical questions. GIS will provide the platform for the
integration of the work of individual members of a collaborative team, whether
this team is a group of researchers or a class of students. The technology handles
both qualitative and quantitative information and the contrasting of multiple
voices, perspectives, and memories. And GIS provides writers with a tool for the
production of striking visualizations of spatial and temporal patterns of human
actions, associations, and cultural perspectives, often on the basis of a carto-
graphic representation, to increase reader understanding of complex and even
nonlinear stories about change and movement.
Current GIS software presents four barriers to its use by historians for explo-
ration, analysis, and interpretation. First, like any digital information management
system, it requires precision in the data entered. This demand for precision runs
counter to the vague, ambiguous, fuzzy quality of most of reality, and it is justifi-
ably troubling to historians who do not want the uncertain, nuanced, unique,
incomplete, fragmented, and "messy" nature of their evidence to be hidden from
them within a digital database. Second, this software is not well adapted to dealing
with time, which is an essential component of historical studies. Fortunately, we
are now creating both new tools for handling within GIS databases the types of
information with which historians work and a model spatial-temporal GIS to deal
with the dynamism of change and movement. Third, new database designs must
be created to represent information about peoples with different ontologies and
semantic systems, and the resulting incongruous databases will have to be inte-
grated through high-speed computing techniques to facilitate historical research.
Fourth, historians must learn to use this tool in historical research and teaching.
Idaho State University has launched an innovative graduate program in geograph-

This content downloaded from 132.178.94.23 on Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:39:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
192 Sixteenth Century Journal XL/1 (2009)

ically integrated history, the MA in historical resources management, to develop

an instructional model that can be adapted to undergraduate and graduate history
programs elsewhere. We believe that historians who have grown up in a digital
gaming and simulation environment will take quickly and easily to GIS and the
research possibilities it offers and will develop research, teaching, and visualiza-
tion techniques that are now difficult to imagine.
One significant advantage of a digital database of whatever type of content is
that it is correctable and extensible, either by its creators or by subsequent
researchers, which over time will greatly enhance the quality and scope of histori-
cal work. In addition to their articles and books, historians will increasingly want
to publish in digital form the information on which they base their conclusions
and narratives, and such publication will be facilitated by digital libraries. How-
ever, the existence of such digital repositories will require the creation of profes-
sional standards for data sharing and joint publication that are common in other
disciplines but absent in the organizations of historians. We are asking these orga-
nizations to establish such standards, but the response by leaders of major national
and international historical associations will depend on their ability to visualize
the future I briefly describe in this article.
Once historians have mastered the tools and concepts necessary to under-
stand better the dynamic complexity of reality, they will cease relying on reified,
essentialist crutches such as "civilization" and "culture" in their analyses and sto-
ries. Most of reality is fundamentally dynamic and nonlinear, and as historians
begin to recognize this reality within their sources, they will discover that the
period from the mid-fifteenth to the early eighteenth century constituted a global,
complex, dynamic, nonlinear system, a first global age, and they will bury forever
the now-fashionable use of the ideological, linear concept of an "early modern"
period. c&
1969 <çj 2009

Sixteenth-Century Slalom: Downhill into the Future

David Porreca
University of Waterloo

The sixteenth century was a time of tremendous change in the religious, political,
and cultural spheres in Western Europe. Despite the world-changing events sur-
rounding Gutenberg, Columbus, and the Ottomans, there was still much that was
recognizably medieval in 1500, especially from the perspective of the common
persons experience of daily life. By 1600, however, the Western world had changed
course entirely. The stasis and relative stability of the previous thousand years- of
course punctuated by its own share of disruption- gave way to a century when the
pace of change was greater than it had been for a long, long time. Thanks to the
discovery and exploitation of the abundant and relatively easily accessible
resources of an entire new continent, Europe entered a phase of growth that has

This content downloaded from 132.178.94.23 on Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:39:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms