It started with a project which was really part of Liverpool's celebration of capital
culture which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It was a project
between myself and the School of Architecture at Liverpool. What we wanted to look at was
the ways in which film had depicted the urban landscape over the years from 1897 when the
first films of the city were made. Working with architects was very interesting because
when we talk about multidisciplinary research projects we of course all bring our own dispositions
and our own languages and our own backgrounds to what we're doing. But certainly for those of us
engaged in this project and it ended up really with one anthropologist, one architecture person
and myself from film studies, what we found ourselves doing was running around on a lot
of interdisciplinary territory. This is partly because we wanted to conduct a survey of the city
and what we were looking at particularly was factual genres. There's been a lot of work in
film studies on the city and film. I'm sure some of you are familiar with that here and some really
really interesting books but they're all very much based on feature films and how subjectivity
is created through feature film production and how in a sense our notion of self and subject
in the city is very wrapped up in an idea of moving image culture. Certainly that's what
film studies people like to think anyway and other disciplines have their own take on this.
But nonetheless in terms of other kinds of images of the city there's really been
very little done yet there is nothing to suggest that other sorts of filmic engagement
actually encourage the same kinds of subjective engagement, particularly when you start to get
people quite early on involved in making films about the city themselves. So we were very
interested in early production, first amateur images of the city arriving around 1925 in terms
of our records, many other studies through that time of early film. Some of you might have heard
of the Mitchell and Kenyon collection of early cinema in Britain which has about five hours of
early film on Liverpool dating from 1901. So there was quite a lot of footage to look at
and we ended up with a database of 1,700 films going through to the mid-1980s. We actually stopped
at the 1984 point which was when the Tory government of the day introduced its first kind
of save Liverpool campaign from urban dereliction and decay because as a city of course its fortunes
have varied enormously over the 20th century and one of the reasons for looking at these films was
to actually look at the ways in which these films had actually recorded and changed those representations
over time and that produces some early work but that early work began to involve maps at quite an
early stage really. The films that most interested us in many ways were the films that recorded the
city that had disappeared and walking around Hamburg I'm struck how much of the city here
has disappeared and I would love to see some of the film at record of Hamburg but in terms of
looking at Liverpool we've got a rich history on film of the way in which the city has been
redeveloped over the years and we started to look at the films in some detail. This particular film
was taken by an amateur photographer in 1961 just before the building that you see
in the image there was demolished that was the old market and the amateur filmmaker spent about
10 minutes walking around the area and recording all those spaces and we remade a film of the same
area trying to as accurately as we could copy the spaces and this was shown along with other works
of remaking as part of some of the capital culture screenings in 2008 but from that we went on into a
much more in-depth mapping of the city which we've been doing since then and we've been using a GIS
base resource and one of the reasons for using GIS was initially because the Museum of Liverpool
which was an organisation we started working with quite early on in relation to this had
done a household historical survey of Merseyside on a GIS base and of course archaeologists the big
users of GIS and there isn't anyone from archaeology on our panel today but archaeologists
are very familiar with GIS and that kind of ancient history use of GIS is very interesting
in terms of work archaeologists are doing around performance and the use of new ways of engaging
with geo environments so the museum curators were very interested in using their historical survey
base to create an interactive map of the city the Museum of Liverpool's first new museum to
be built in the UK for over 100 years so it was an opportunity to think about things differently
and to do things differently so part of what we were doing was working with the museum and part
of what we were doing was mapping this relationship between film space and urban geographical space
one of the things we were looking at that we thought was very interesting was that the GIS
enabled both quantitative and qualitative modes of analysis because once you start working with
films and location data it's possible to begin to create a cinematic geography from the features
that you see in the films and that's using both point line and polygon data so just to show you
a kind of this is our mega map if you like and by Ian's terms as a GIS person I think it's
probably rather a crude map but nonetheless it shows all the spaces in films of the city
between the era that we're talking about now these are location it's location point data not film
data so some films of course will have very repetitive data in relation to particular
locations and some films won't feature any of those locations so we've gone on from that to
actually think about more refined data analysis and this of course is visualizing the visual
and for us GIS has been a very useful visualization tool so in this map of 1950s documentaries of the
city we can see how many of them actually are about civic and municipal spaces so the little
houses represent in fact the civic and municipal buildings the grand buildings if you like
and the other spaces in documentaries are just there as black dots and if we compare that to
amateur footage of the city also taken in the 1950s you see we get quite a different pattern
and although you can get these patterns probably from statistical data
they don't actually impress on you some of the core ideas around amateur filmmaking
and traditional documentary practice and how it's different in the way a spatial map can
so spatial maps I think can begin to reveal issues and things to us for analysis that we
wouldn't necessarily pick up if we were looking at things differently and that's certainly the
experience of other film status scholars who've done some rather different work to this but have
nonetheless found GIS maps useful in terms of their work and I can certainly talk a little bit
about that later if people are interested but certainly what we found we were able to do using
GIS was to navigate the spatial histories so we know exactly for example which areas are being
used for festivals and events which areas tend to have political importance at particular moments
in time where people are gathering to protest or to create people's movements we're able to cultivate
new frameworks of analytical inquiry much of that has been based on thinking about space
simulation to ethnographic use particularly of film as an ethnographic medium it's not
particularly thought of as an ethnographic medium outside of anthropology so for film
studies use to start thinking about people who are intent on making films as ethnography
is a rather different move to some of the moves that are current in the discipline it's also
developed quite interestingly dialogic and interactive forms of spatial engagement with
local film heritage and also with local heritage sites so it's enabled us to engage in current
debates about the redevelopment of the city and that's certainly one of the things the film can
do is to engage people in both their memories and their ideas about the city in in these debates
about how city space should be used what kind of regeneration do we want what sort of buildings do
we want in a regenerated building of the city and certainly from the architecture and planning
angle that's certainly where they've come from from our perspective or rather the more humanities
perspective around public participation psycho geographic narratives these have also been
enhanced we found public participation in talking about their memories and in talking about their
own journeys around the city is greatly facilitated through the use of screenings in terms of the
museum they've constructed a map based on the database and this was their original kind of
prototype idea for the map and you can see that the map interface that they've designed is in
terms of maps one that would be fairly familiar to people as a map and people can go into this
interface and navigate around it using the kind of buttons that are there on the left and in fact
where we've got streets people buildings not all history we've got film content in these
particular areas and here's the map in use it was opened in december 2011 so it's only recently
been opened and you can see some film images there coming up on the map in relation to different
areas of the city and there's a slightly more elongated view of the gallery where the map sits
it sits in the history detectives gallery at the museum of Liverpool and the film it content forms
a part of what is a deep map of the city or rather as David would see it to kind of move towards
trying to create a deep map the idea is this map is going to be used to attach local stories
local ideas about place and identity drawing on the museum's collections which have now been
extensively GIS referenced and are gradually getting put onto the map so the map is an
ongoing working process which local people will contribute to and develop and in that sense it's
participatory we haven't gone the online route the museum is a building and it wanted people
to come in and visit the museum so so they've chosen not to go the online route not so far
anyway and they really want people to be there in the building and using their resource
excuse me for coughing and managed to pick up a cold on the plane
just then thinking back more broadly about the advantages of GIS in terms of our project
well certainly we were able to undertake this layering of cine spatial shot by shot data
and that's been interesting and what what we did of course was convert our original
database which was already referenced by location just by adding the reference points
the visualizations revealed spatial specificities that underwrite particular film genres in new
and productive ways and certainly we found that it in the in terms of getting people involved
that's certainly happening and we've had some informal workshops in the museum or rather the
curators have where they've announced they're going to explore a particular film in a particular place
in relation to the images and that's worked extremely well excuse me sorry my voice is fading
now in terms of limitations i think the practical limitations certainly for the museum are those of
cost and long-term commitment maintaining the maps dependent on high levels of technological
expertise and curatorship so creating a poly vocal multi-valent cultural platform thank you very
much thank you actually isn't very easy i'm sorry material of course has to be transformed
has to be edited has to be made suitable to be put on the map and i think that's the same with any
source you have to actually have people putting the information onto the map in a way that the map
can handle so in that sense there's limitation it's certainly been a very big challenge for me
working not only with architects but with people in gi science um and working with museum curators
and i think one of the things of coordinating a big project like this is the degree to which
our disciplinary languages don't always perhaps aid cross cross fertilization shall i say of
ideas we've had problems in in particular areas about understanding particularly actually with
museum designers i think they've been the most difficult group to actually talk to not only for
us but also for the museum curators and that's been a general thing that people have found
um so i'll leave it there and leave it for david to open up the floor now hopefully with some
more general sort of questions um there's a few references there anybody wants to take a shot
i do want to open the floor up but i also want to conclude this by talking a little bit about
something that julia referred to in her presentation and that was the notion of a deep map
i think if if i mean we've heard here from bob and from anne and from julia about some of the
ways in which gis has helped their own research some of the ways in which it has made space and
spatiality evident to them some of the ways in which they have uh they have discovered patterns
that they may not have seen otherwise and to be sure that has been the the lesson i think that
we have learned over the last two decades about the strengths of gis it has helped to integrate
and visualize information and to represent that information on a map of a space that we recognize
but what it does not do very well is it does not go beyond that map much of what it does is really
simple mapping it lets us see things that we might not have seen otherwise and perhaps that's
sufficient for most of us but i suspect that if we as humanists had been the ones to design
gis we wouldn't have designed it in the way that it is that it currently exists we would have done
something different because what we would want to do i think is to figure out how to populate that
map with other things how to create an environment in which we can do some of the things that bob
mentioned that he would like to be able to do how we could pull different perceptions and how we
could pull the emotional experience into that environment how we could begin to in that
environment see the kind of multiple perspectives that we know are within any space how it is that
we can with recognizing that we experience the world through our bodies as we move through space
how we can replicate that within the virtual environment how we can do all of those things
that help give us a better sense a richer sense a more evocative sense a more a different sense
of the context than what we would see when we look at the two-dimensional map and over the past
earlier this summer in the past the last two weeks in june with my colleagues in the virtual
center for spatial humanities which is a collaboration among florida state university
west virginia university and iupui involving a geographer historian and a person in religious
studies as co-directors we held a advanced institute on the spatial humanities focusing
on special narratives in deep maps that is we recognize that the argument that that really
what we're out to do as humanist is to create a narrative and out of that narrative frame an
argument and that argument in this sense needs to take needs to take explicit recognition of the
influence of space on our actions and of our actions on our conceptions of space but how do
we do that and we came to the understanding at least we think we're coming to the understanding
that the only way you can do it is through a deep map and we invited 12 participants this
was all sponsored by the national endowment for the humanities we invited 12 participants
five of them came from the uk one from canada six from the us they were for the most part
geographers and historians religious studies people they were at various stages in their
career we had senior gis people and we had some just finishing their doctorate in a variety of
things one of the participants is in this room today and over the over the course of two weeks
we tried to wrestle with this notion of what would a deep map look like what would be its
characteristics and what i want to show you now is some of what we came to as an understanding of
this that is a deep map is in fact a dynamic virtual environment for analyzing and experiencing
the reciprocal influence of real and conceptual space on human society and culture and to make
that happen there has to have certain characteristics one is it must be especially and temporally scaled
bob talked about the need to make connection across scales and among scales and between scales
and that's really important for those of us as humanists if you'll notice the way we write about
things we don't always write about things at a scale a single scale we oftentimes compare across
scales and some of those scales are temporal and some of them are spatial so a deep map must be
able to do that a gis doesn't do that very well it must be a semantically and visually rich
environment and that is multi-vocal that is it must be an environment in which we can find many
voices because in fact all of the context that we study are multi-vocal and it must be semantically
and visually rich because in fact we experience the world both in through the the uh through the
word as well as through the eyes it's got to be an open-ended environment but not wide open and
the way that you keep it from being wide open is to have it problem focused so a deep map is just
not an archive it's not something a bucket into which you dump everything it's really framed and
designed to solve a problem that you're interested in it's a curated map in other words we place
evidence into that map into that environment it's we as we discover it but because it's a it is an
open-ended process and in fact the mapping we came to understand is as much a process as it is a
product that it is a uh as we begin to as we collect that information as we understand our
subject as we understand our problem more then we begin to add more material to that we begin to
thicken our map we begin to make it truly deep and we integrate that we recognize that these
pieces of evidence regardless of whether they're visual regardless of whether they're quantitative
or qualitative that they are in fact all part of the environment that we must understand and
out of which we must frame the spatial narrative that leads us to an argument because ultimately
it is the argument that we're after that's what's going to contribute to scholarship
that in fact the deep map needs to be an immersive environment it needs to be something that we can
experience insofar as you can do that virtually that it is an environment in which contingency
is evident because we as humanists are aware always of contingencies in fact the environment
needs to be such so that we know that when we see evidence that a choice has been made we can see
the choices that have not been made we can see in that environment the paths that were not taken
and it must be an environment in which we can discover and we can rediscover
it has to support a spatial narrative and a spatial argument through the notion of reflexive
pathways that is that in this environment we have to know where we have been not just simply where
we are going and we have to see where other people have been also because that is what makes the
environment an environment in which argument can take place and not that only not that leads to
argument alone and finally the map must be subversive of itself that is that we must the
map must be available to us to continually discover things and to add things that subvert
what it is that we think we know from it now this is an environment to be certain that doesn't exist
yet but if we were to design a deep if we were to design a mapping tool or a set of mapping
technologies to do what it is that we as humanists are interested in i think it would look a lot more
like this than it looks like gis that's not to say that gis is not a powerful tool it is
and we've all experienced some of that power and you've seen three examples of its power today
but it's not enough it keeps us too bounded to the quantitative it keeps us too limited in terms
of the visualizations it denies to us oftentimes the experience that we seek to replicate with our
words so how do we create that environment where do we pull these tools it's not going to be an
environment or a set of tools that is solely geographic or solely spatial it's going to be
a set of tools that we can pull from much as you would pull from a tool in the apple app store
use it for your purposes to filter information so that you can begin to use it effectively to
construct but it's always going to force the issue of space upon you so that no longer would
we be able to talk as humanists about context without recognizing that that context occurs
somewhere at some time it always keeps us bounded in that sense so i guess my argument would be
it might be that we start with the gis it is a it is a wonderful tool we've all profited from it
enormously but that's not where we end and one of our challenges and maybe our agenda needs to be
to move toward this environment that is really much more suitable to the kind of work that we're
interested in as humanists well with that i want to open the floor for discussion we have about 15
minutes i was hoping to have some back and forth with the panelists but i think that perhaps it
is better if we just open this for your questions and your comments your challenges or your
endorsements whichever are there any questions or comments yes