The Spatial Humanities

GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship

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

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780253013637
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Geographic information systems (GIS) have spurred a renewed interest in the influence of geographical space on human behavior and cultural development. Ideally GIS enables humanities scholars to discover relationships of memory, artifact, and experience that exist in a particular place and across time. Although successfully used by other disciplines, efforts by humanists to apply GIS and the spatial analytic method in their studies have been limited and halting. The Spatial Humanities aims to re-orient—and perhaps revolutionize—humanities scholarship by critically engaging the technology and specifically directing it to the subject matter of the humanities. To this end, the contributors explore the potential of spatial methods such as text-based geographical analysis, multimedia GIS, animated maps, deep contingency, deep mapping, and the geo-spatial semantic web.

ONE

Turning toward Place, Space, and Time

EDWARD L. AYERS

Just as many disciplines rediscovered place and space over the last thirty years, so did they rediscover time and temporal representation. A critical geography and a new historicism have reoriented many humanists and social science disciplines. Like the spatial turn, the temporal turn now grounds the analysis of everything from literature to sociology in new kinds of contexts. The exciting challenge before us now is integrating those new perspectives, taking advantage of what they have to teach us.

The spatial turn began within the discipline of geography itself. By the early 1970s, geographer Edward Soja observes, many people in the field “sought alternative paths to rigorous geographical analysis that were not reducible to pure geometries.” In this new critical geography, “rather than being seen only as a physical backdrop, container, or stage to human life, space is more insightfully viewed as a complex social formation, part of a dynamic process.” By making this argument, geographers opened their discipline to humanists and social scientists who found congenial both a skepticism toward positivist social science and a focus on the texture of experience.¹

For non-geographers, the spatial turn has been largely defined by a greater awareness of place, manifested in specific sites where human action takes place. As Karen Halttunen told the members of the American Studies Association in her presidential address, studies of place in the humanities have tended to focus on the particular, the narrative, and the concrete, to show “a strong sense of the constructedness of place, of place-making as an ongoing and always contested process, and of the creative variety of cultural practices employed for placemaking.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Halttunen noted, “spatial analysis tended to the metaphorical, as we adopted the idiom of borders and boundaries, frontiers and crossroads, centers and margins. In literature, the new regionalism and the booming field of ecocriticism foreground what had been considered mere background or setting.”²

At the same time the critical geography of place gained momentum, another innovation in geography sped up as well. This geography, based in the rigorous mathematical background of many practitioners in the field, grew from new technological developments, especially Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Not content simply to apply the new tools, however, “geographers became increasingly concerned with the fundamental theoretical issues related to spatial data handling,” geographer Daniel Sui points out. “Geographers were no longer intellectually satisfied with mere technical innovations. If GIS had become the answer, many geographers were itching to ask, what was the question?”³

Geographers have used cognitive science, computer science, physics, non-Euclidean geometry, neural computing, and fractal geometry to extend their understanding of space, with each new method and conjunction of methods raising new questions. Greater power of analysis brings new questions to the surface. GIS, Sui observes, “has been examined through every critical lens of social theory and poststructuralist perspective, ranging from feminist theories to indigenous knowledge, public participation, hermeneutics, political ecology, actor-network theory, critical media theories, and linguistic philosophies and ethics.” Sui believes that “computational, spatial, social, environmental, and aesthetic dimensions” will all flourish as geography moves forward, for geography “is a fertile ground for crossing the traditional boundaries of science, social theory, technology, and the humanities.”⁴

The study of place and the study of space, in other words, converge in a heightened self-awareness that is useful for geographers and others as well. “Because of geography’s focus on studying subject matter in common with the humanities and sciences or the human and natural sciences, it has sometimes been called the bridging discipline or an interfacing or fusing discipline,” geographer Stanley Brunn argues. “That is, it is the discipline most concerned with studying the relationships between the human and physical phenomena.” Geographers “are both exporters and importers of knowledge” and thus geography serves as a sturdy bridge crossed by many disciplines.⁵

Another bridging discipline deals with the other defining context in human life: time. That discipline, of course, is history. Maps and history are deeply complementary. “Both reduce the infinitely complex to a finite, manageable, frame of reference,” theorist Denis Cosgrove points out. “Both involve the imposition of artificial grids—hours and days, longitude and latitude—on temporal and spatial landscapes, or perhaps I should say timescapes and landscape. Both provide a way of reversing divisibility, of retrieving unity, of recapturing a sense of the whole, even though it can not be the whole.” Maps and histories do the same kind of work in different disciplines, in different dimensions of human experience.⁶

History, no less than other disciplines, took its own spatial turn. The turn did not prove a wrenching change of direction for history, because history has always had a strong spatial component. Historians have long relied on maps and have always plotted stories in space as well as time. Geographers and historians have usually seen the other as allies, fellow travelers. That is because, as D. W. Meinig, a pioneering practitioner of both disciplines, argues, “geography, like history and unlike the sciences, is not the study of any particular kind of thing, but a particular way of studying almost anything. Geography is a point of view, a way of looking at things. If one focuses on how all kinds of things exist together spatially, in areas, with a special emphasis on context and coherence, one is working as a geographer.” And if we substitute “temporally” for “spatially” in the preceding sentence, and exchange “historian” for “geographer,” we are describing history.⁷

History has absorbed place, the more humanistic aspect of the spatial turn, in studies of everything from regions and the environment to consumer culture and slavery. But it has not quite known what to do with the more analytical, technologically enabled component of the new geography. That is in part because history is, at heart, a humanistic discipline rather than a social science. Despite forays into quantification, history tends toward the singular and particular, toward interpretation rather than generalization, toward the narrative rather than the model. Historians, accordingly, have not developed very explicit theories of space or place. Each representation tends to be handmade, custom-built.

Despite the affinities of history and geography, trying to comprehend space, place, and time in concert has always proven difficult. As the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper asked decades ago, “How can one both move and carry along with one the fermenting depths which are also, at every point, influenced by the pressure of events around them? And how can one possibly do this so that the result is readable? That is the problem.”⁸ How, in other words, might we combine the obvious strengths of geographic understanding with the focus on the ineffable, the irreducible, the singular, that is at the heart of history? How might we integrate structure, process, and event? How might we combine space, place, and time?

Novelists have figured out ways to represent the concatenation of time and space in human lives. More than seventy years ago the brilliant Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin defined the “chronotope,” “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” Bakhtin described the magic of the chronotope in beautiful language, even in translation: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” For Bakhtin, “the chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied…. Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins.”⁹

Sometimes historians can create the magical narrative effect Bakhtin describes, the same evocative fusion of place and time in human experience. But they cannot count on that success and, besides, historians have responsibilities beyond narrative. They need not only to evoke time and space, but to explain in more explicit ways the workings of both and the relationship between the two. Since time and space are so closely linked, it may be that the spatial turn can present an opportunity to think about time in new ways as well.

One line of thought, decades now in the making, the product of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and others, seems to hold out the promise of unifying action in place and time. This tradition of analysis, written in a common spirit but not constituting a unified school, argues that social power can be best perceived in “practice” rather than in categories. These analysts of what has come to be called “practice theory” have taken things apart—dismantling generalizations about cultures, classes, races, and societies, casting aside older Marxian, neoclassical, and structuralist models—and put them back together in more dynamic, interrelated, and complicated ways. They show that the cultural and the material are parts of the same processes and structures, that they cannot be separated. Leading theorists in this vein include Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Marshall Sahlins, Raymond Williams, and Sherry Ortner.

Historians have not been leaders in defining practice theory, but they have recently taken up discussion of the approach. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, synthesizing the literature, argues that practice theory’s accent “on the historically generated and always contingent nature of structures of culture returns historiography to its age-old concern with processes, agents, change, and transformation, while demanding the kind of empirically grounded research into the particularities of social and cultural conditions with which historians are by training and tradition most comfortable.” William H. Sewell, Jr., another prominent historian, believes that “social life may be conceptualized as being composed of countless happenings or encounters in which persons and groups of persons engage in social action. Their actions are constrained and enabled by the constitutive structures of their societies.” As a result, “‘societies’ or ‘social formations’ or ‘social systems’ are continually shaped and reshaped by the creativity and stubbornness of their human creators.”¹⁰

This model bears a striking resemblance to notions of place portrayed after the spatial turn. Like the highly inflected, multifarious representations of space growing out of critical geography, time in practice theory is less a unified field, a background, than an active participant in the story. The sociologist Andrew Abbott describes time as others describe space. Time, for him, is “a series of overlapping presents of various sizes, each organized around a particular location and overlapping across the whole social process.” Time is not fixed, not a given. “Within this complex world, change is the normal state of affairs. We do not see a largely stable world that changes occasionally, but a continuously changing world that has macroscopic stabilities emerging throughout it. This world is a world of events.” Stability in this eventful world is not the default. As a result, “the fact that everything—no matter how large—is perpetually being reproduced means that everything—no matter how large—is always on the line. So sudden large-scale change is not surprising.”¹¹

Time, like geography, can be disassembled analytically. Just as we differentiate between a more generalized space and a more localized place, so can we differentiate general processes from specific events. We live daily in places and events but we are parts of large spaces and processes we can perceive through efforts of disciplined inquiry. Just as a geographer relates place and space, so do historians relate event and process. Geography locates us on a physical and cultural landscape while history locates us in time. Joining the two kinds of analysis in a dynamic and subtle way offers an exciting prospect. Practice theory, a supple way to imagine both structure and activity, may help.

The everyday and the local, a common focus in practice theory, would seem to have at least one great limitation: explaining larger social changes. How do we get from the prosaic to the transformational? In fact, practice theory proves to be a way to explain how big and sudden changes penetrate deeply into people’s hearts and minds. “All social life is ‘contingent,’ implicated and unpredictable, because all parts of life depend on each other,” I have argued elsewhere. “What we think of as public and private, economic and political, religious and secular, and military and civilian are deeply connected. Social change can start anywhere and lead anywhere.” Such a perspective argues for the intricate interplay of the structural and the ephemeral, the enduring and the emergent. This is “deep contingency,” a view of social life that fuses an active sense of place and an active sense of time.¹²

Deep contingency tries to suggest how societies can change their self-understanding quickly and profoundly. Secession in the United States, where states decided in a matter of weeks to join a new Confederacy and sacrifice everything in that new purpose, is one example; others might include the Russian Revolution or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Practice theory addresses these ruptures. As William Sewell argues, “big and ponderous social processes are never entirely immune from being transformed by small alterations in volatile local social processes…. Because structures are articulated to other structures, initially localized ruptures always have the potential of bringing about a cascading series of further ruptures that will result in structural transformations—that is, changes in cultural schemas, shifts of resources, and the emergence of new modes of power.”¹³

Deep contingency needs to be distinguished from what we might call surface contingency, the familiar historical staples of accident, personality, and timing, the clichés of “what ifs” and “almosts.” While surface contingency can sometimes trigger deep contingency, the great majority of unpredictable events come and go without much consequence; deep contingency, visible only after it has arrived, reverberates throughout the recesses of the social order. “A single, isolated rupture rarely has the effect of transforming structures because standard procedures and sanctions can usually repair the torn fabric of social practice,” Sewell argues. “Ruptures spiral into transformative historical events when a sequence of interrelated ruptures disarticulates the previous structural network, makes repair difficult, and makes a novel rearticulation possible.”¹⁴

To understand deep contingency we must try to comprehend a society as a whole, its structures of ideology, culture, and faith as well as its structures of economics and politics. All structures must be put into motion and motion put into structures. As literar...