I think time for us to start, so good afternoon for a late afternoon after a long day.
My name is David Bogenhammer, I'm executive director of the Polis Center at Indiana University,
Purdue University, Indianapolis.
That's one of the longest names for a university anywhere in the world.
And I'm also a professor of history and with an adjunct professor of informatics.
And it's my pleasure today to be the moderator for a panel discussion on developing the spatial
humanities.
Now the spatial humanities is more than just GIS, it's not historical GIS or humanities
GIS.
It's how it is that we take all the geospatial technologies and apply them to the humanities
creatively.
How it is that we ask these technologies to bend themselves to the needs that we have
as humanists for things that these humanities technologies do not always do easily.
We want to talk about today the geospatial technologies as a platform for cross disciplinary
scholarship.
And joining me on this panel is Ian Gregory, professor of digital humanities at Lancaster
University.
And he's going to be talking and presenting briefly, and I'll talk about the structure
of this program in just a moment, on GIS and textual linguistics analysis project that
he's been running.
Our second speaker will be Julia, excuse me, Robert, excuse me, our first speaker is going
to be Robert Schwartz, who is a Mount Holyoke professor of history at the Mount Holyoke
College in the US, whose project is on railroads and rural development in France.
It's a traditional historical GIS project.
Following him will be Ian, and then following Ian will be Julia Hallam, who is head of communication
and media studies at the University of Liverpool, who has an important project in GIS and film
studies.
Now, our goal here is to have a good panel discussion, and then to involve the audience
in that discussion.
I'll have to apologize, Paul L. did not show up, so I'm not sure what the reason is, but
we apologize for his absence.
We will have each of us making a 10 to 15 minute presentation, followed by some discussion
among the panel, and then opening that discussion up to the audience.
And we do want that kind of discussion, because we think that what we intend to explore here
is how it is that we can ask geospatial technologies to do the work of humanists.
The key themes are listed in the abstract that was in the program, but let me just simply
repeat them here, because I think they're really important themes.
One is we recognize that there is an epistemological clash between the humanities and GIS as a
technology.
But I mean that GIS as a technology insists upon precision.
It insists that things can be measured and placed on the planet Earth.
And the humanities do not see reality in quite that same way.
For the humanities, the ability to discover is both recursive and reflexive.
We're continually revisiting evidence.
We're continually revisiting our questions.
We're continually coming up with new interpretations.
Precision is not a word that we use easily, and it's oftentimes not in our vocabulary.
That when we're talking about the spatial humanities, really one of our challenges is
how we design and frame spatial narratives about individual and collective human experience.
Ultimately, that's what drives us, is trying to understand the human experience that we
have individually and collectively.
And in this sense, trying to understand it spatially, trying to understand the reciprocal
influence that we as humans have on the construction of space, both real and conceptual space,
and the ways in which that real and conceptual space in turn shape us as individuals and
as a society.
And then from that, learning how to build increasingly complex maps, not just of the
visible aspects of place, because it is place that engages us most frequently, but also
of those invisible aspects, including such things as memory.
How do we experience space and place within the technologies that are available to us?
How do we capture memories?
How do we capture emotions and make them part of the corpus of work that is being done within
the spatial humanities?
To help us wrestle with these three themes, we're going to ask three questions.
And that is, I'm going to ask each of the panelists in turn to discuss what advantages
do the geospatial technologies bring to their own research, and what are the limitations
of that that they've experienced, and how do they overcome or work around these limits.
How did their projects address the mismatch between the positivist assumptions of GIS
and the multivalent and reflexive nature of humanities scholarship?
And then finally, what lessons have they learned that would be helpful for all of us who want
to use these technologies?
So with that as introduction, I'm going to ask that Ian then address these questions,
follow, excuse me, Robert addressed these questions, followed by Ian and then Julia.
Good afternoon.
If I were in France, I would be giving a Cour Magistral, I think.
This is an ample auditorium.
And we do really insist that you help us in raising questions, making comments, and so
forth, because the hall perhaps militates against us because it's so large.
But nonetheless, let's give it a shot.
All right, so let me get my presentation up.
Let's see, how do I do that?
I'm not used to the, oh, there, sorry.
I'm a historian, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the, that one, yeah, a project that
I've been working on with geographers.
One of them is sitting here, his name is Ian, and he will talk later.
Another one is in Dijon, France, and his name is Thomas Tevenan.
And I have him on the kind of credit list here, because some of the things that I'm
going to talk about were really a work that Thomas carried out somewhat with my help,
but some of the technical stuff is really his.
What I'd like to do is to try to give you a couple of examples how geographic information
systems can contribute to what I call spatial history.
It is a genre, I suppose, of spatial humanities, but it's a particular type of spatial humanities.
And how historical research, on the other hand, can also contribute to what I would
say is spatial humanities.
So I'm sort of looking at ways in which the collaboration between something very technological,
if you will, and humanities kinds of questions.
The case at hand will be the expansion of railways in France during the 19th century.
And what I've been working on, won't be talking about here, is really how railway expansion
proceeds, but then how does it affect population change and population growth, as well as
how does it affect, how did it affect the expansion of railways, agricultural change?
Those are three kind of pieces of a triangle of research questions.
Our research has been sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United
States and the French National Research Agency in France.
One of the things that I try to show is that GIS is a marvelous way to develop very tangible
spatial and temporal patterns that then sort of can lead us to ask questions about somewhat
like David was suggesting, perceptions, memories, real people's experience, because we have
a textured and quite detailed geohistorical context.
One of the examples I want to talk about is really what is the meaning of distance and
proximity.
And then finally I want to look from France, go across the English Channel very briefly,
to look at how GIS and novels can be useful in a dialogue.
And I'll use the example of the novel by Thomas Hardy called Tests of the Durbovilles.
So let's look at a real quick list of how GIS could contribute to at least my research
and to spatial history, as I'll call it.
One of the things that I've benefited from is that GIS technology really allows for large
scale comparisons.
In my particular case, I'm looking at Great Britain, France, as well as the United States
having to do with the impact of railways and agricultural, kind of the globalization of
agricultural goods and so forth.
And all of this is made much easier by the availability of GIS databases on agriculture
and railways.
It's also, GIS I think is particularly useful in applying the notion that geographers have
developed about scale.
That is, human activity can be conceived as operating on many different scales, but if
we simplify it a bit, we can say that there is a global scale or a international scale.
There is also a national scale, and that is the scale in which railways were developed
in the 19th century.
There's within nations, there are regions, and within regions, there are particular places.
They could be towns, they could be parishes, they could be cantons in France or in parishes
or commune in France, anyhow.
So the technology really allows us to look at the interconnectivity at different levels
and to try to tease out some interconnectivity.
It also has permitted me to try to join a number of different research domains.
If you are a historian, you know that there are lots of historians interested in historical
demography, there are others who are interested in railway development, still others in agriculture
and so forth, and they often talk to each other, but not across to each other.
And GIS in my case has helped me to look at questions about relationships between how
do railways affect migration, how do railways affect agriculture, and so forth.
So that's been very helpful.
And finally, spatio-temporal patterns that are discovered really raise very fascinating questions,
usually the order of why this particular pattern manifested itself, but also about what a particular
pattern, let's say, a proximity has changed because of high-speed rail, how was that experienced
by people at the time?
There are also some limitations that you have to be careful about.
I sort of see GIS at the moment as a kind of reductionist technology.
In other words, in some ways you can say that the real world is reduced to points, lines,
and polygons if you are looking at the vector GIS world, or it's reduced to pixels, grids,
and surfaces if you are dealing in the raster GIS world.
So you have to be careful about that, because the same, that particular view of how to reconstruct
reality can narrow your research questions.
So you have to be careful there.
Finally, I think the technology can facilitate simplicity in that reductionist mode of operation,
and that's what I want to try to show next about how we overcome that.
So one of the primitives, you might say, of geo-history or geographical thinking is distance
and proximity.
And in this case we could ask a very simple question, how far is Paris from Lyon?
And the rapid response from GIS would be the Cartesian or Euclidean distance.
Well, it's 405 kilometers as the crow flies.
Well, of course, that's an answer, but it's not a very satisfying answer, because nobody,
unless you, particularly in 1800, if you ask like a carter, how long did it get to Paris,
he's not going to be flying with a crow to Paris, right?
So historians are more apt to ask, well, let's see, about 1800, how long did it take to get
a horse-drawn cart of leonade goods to the capital?
And even more interesting, getting in deeper into human experience, did the carter, when
he took the goods to Paris along the roads and so forth, did he think that that was a
long journey?
Something extraordinary, quite challenging, difficult, maybe a little risky, or was it
just a common practice in his particular trade?
Those are kinds of questions that you can't answer with GIS, but you can with documents
and other things.
Let's see, okay, well, let's see, I'm trying to get to the next slide.
Then I'm trying to press down, and the railroad has stopped.
The railroad has stopped.
I need help, Captain, you know, I'm not sure why it's not, oh, nothing, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, ohbc.
Well, what I'm going to, I'll tell you what I'm going to try to illustrate.
This is what's called the demo-demo that arrives every once in a while when you're making a
presentation to a lovely group like this.
What I'm trying to show you is that GIS can do much better than, say, the Euclidean distance
between Paris and New York, okay, and we can use a cross-estimate approach to figure out
much, much more precisely how long does it take to get from any commune in France, let's
say, in 1860, to any other commune in France in 1860, or to Paris or anything.
Then we can ask, well, is that the same amount of time that will take in 1880, 1900, and
so forth?
There are ways in which we can make these estimates that are quite revealing, and they're
not perfect, that's for sure, but they're quite useful.
This is like the Deutsche Bahn and revolting against railways and things.
Nonetheless, so let me tell you the story.
So how do we do that?
Well, first we have to estimate how long does it take a man or a woman to walk from any
particular commune at the very small unit, the smallest unit, administrative unit in
France, to the closest station at a particular point in time?
And will that travel be a flat space, or will it be undulated or something?
So we have to correct for, say, five kilometers an hour, which is kind of an estimate now,
to walk in speed.
So we have to inflect that with the geography and the photography.
And then once he or she arrives at the station, no one will take it again to another place in
France.
And this can be done with, I guess it's the Deutsche Bahn software that's needed.
But anyhow, it can be done pretty easily by, can we get that fourth slide up?
Yes, but not in full screen mode, some problems, okay?
So now you can turn it in.
Number four.
All right.
Sorry about that.
So here's the idea.
Okay.
So we'll just, yeah.
And so anyhow, so we have the man walking from the village.
He goes up this particular trace to the nearest railroad station.
Then we figure in the constraints of the topography.
And then we add the estimated speed of the railways and so forth.
So that gives us an interesting kind of mapping, which I'm not sure if this will work or not.
But this is a, probably no, I don't want to risk this.
Because this is a video that shows us over time how the proximity for people getting to the nearest
rail station will diminish in time and in space, okay?
So that only those who lived in kind of the Paris basin in 1850 would be able to get to a railroad station
and to another point within some hours.
Everybody else was in 24 hours or more.
And then the second example is, all right, given that, how long does it take to get to any particular
commune in the country?
And I will not try the video for fear that it will not work.
Anyhow, what you see is a lovely little map.
Let me see if I can, nope.
Anyhow, I hope you can use your imagination and you can imagine this map changing color and the distance
from any particular place in France to any other particular France begins to diminish in time.
But remember, so this is change over space and over time together.
All right.
And so once we have that estimate, then we want to ask these other kinds of questions.
Well, what did it mean for people at various places in France to have access within, you know,
access immediate or very close access to the railway?
And in a little canton of Saint-Saëns-Laiby who didn't get on to the railway network, at least approximately,
until about 1904, it meant a lot.
And I won't read the euphoric kind of expression of how modernity is finally coming to the canton by a politician.
But nonetheless, part of his enthusiasm for, you know, the advent of modernity in the canton of Saint-Saëns-Laiby was well expressed.
And, you know, it's manifested by these photographs that are not quantitative, more qualitative,
but they really give us some sense of the experiential part of the shrinkage of distance.
Let me go now real quickly to sort of an example of how modernity and changing perceptions of production and consumption could be followed,
you know, that I have in the County of Dorset in England.
Tess of the Derbervilles is a novel by Hardy written in 1891, and it tells the sad story of a young woman who is raped,
then finds happiness on a dairy farm, and marries only to be thrown over by her husband because she has been with another man,
and her life, it goes downhill, though the ending is sort of happy.
Well, anyhow, she dies, but it's happy. Or it's positive.
Anyhow, the way Hardy describes the railway is very interesting.
He describes it as modern life coming to this region of Britain,
which he kind of likes or adores as a kind of isolated place not completely tainted by modernity.
But anyhow, the train coming, you know, several times a day is really important for the livelihood of the dairy where Tess works and so forth.
Finally, there is a, Hardy puts into the mouths of Tess and her lover, Angel, some very interesting remarks
about the understanding or the coming to understanding about how rapid transit has really changed people's perception and understanding
of where things are produced and where they are consumed.
And, you know, Tess begins by saying, Londoners will drink the milk that they've just taken to the station at their breakfast tomorrow, won't they?
Strange people that we have never seen.
And Angel goes, yes, I suppose they will. There will be noblemen and women and ladies in trades, women and so forth,
babies and others who've never seen a cow.
And then Tess closes by saying, who don't know anything of us and where it comes from,
or think how we drove two miles across the moor tonight in the rain that it might reach in time.
So, again, that's the kind of change in mental association of how far is far and so forth.
So, last, conclusion.
So, what I've been trying to suggest is that GIS really does enable us to discover some patterns of spatial and temporal interconnectivity
that otherwise would remain kind of vague generalizations and maybe a theoretical proposition or vague guesswork
or confident assertions about things that don't have evidence.
And then, secondly, by providing these rich, historical, geo-historical contexts,
they really evoke, solicit some very interesting opportunities for teasing out meanings and explanations.
I'm sort of arguing here also that GIS should not be the tail that wags the dog,
but the historian or the humanist or whoever who's in control here should subordinate the GIS to the research questions.
And in that way, historians' questions and research can bring alive, you know, technology. Thank you.
Thank you.