In 1823, at a small school in western Vermont, Frances Alsop Henshaw, the
14-year-old daughter of a prosperous merchant, produced a remarkable
cartographic and textual artifact. Henshaw’s "Book of Penmanship Executed
at the Middlebury Female Academy" is a slim volume, later bound in marble
boards, containing – in addition to the expected, set copy-texts of a
practice-book – a series of hand-drawn, delicately-colored maps of our nineteen
United States, each one paired with an edited, geometrically-designed and
embellished prose passage selected from the geography books available to a
schoolgirl in the new American republic.
As a work of juvenilia, Henshaw’s "Book of Penmanship" is no less
remarkable in its artistic and imaginative accomplishment for being exemplary of
larger trends in the geographic education of nineteenth-century Americans. A
sampler in codex form, the book constitutes a set of interrelated pedagogical
and personal exercises in geospatial and textual graphesis, or subjective
knowledge-production through the creation of images and texts-as-image. Drawing
exercises of this sort were developed by noted American educator Emma Willard,
founder of Henshaw’s Vermont school and author of several geography textbooks.
In a period when reading and recitation of geodetic texts were presumed the best
aids to spatial memory, Emma Willard believed that students should learn through
the personal creation and analysis of drawings – even, or perhaps especially, of
drawings that embed subjectivity and aesthetic choice. ("In history,"
wrote Willard, with characteristic confidence, "I have invented the
map.")
Work and interest in the geospatial humanities is growing – at a variety of
scales, and with a variety of institutional inflections – in libraries, academic
departments, and digital centers around the world. Despite the richness of this
activity, scholars press up against a well-documented series of obstacles,
pragmatic and conceptual, in their use of spatial tools, datasets, and
methods.invent the map?
An examination of spatial decision-making and of the interplay among text, image,
and geographical source material in the Henshaw book may suggest relations among
her enterprise and some ambitions held by modern humanities scholars for
geospatial technology. These relations hinge on an openness to graphesis and
iterative design as a legitimate method in digital scholarship. I will also
argue that a fresh, steady look at cartographic and geospatial technologies for
the digital humanities should not be taken alone in the context of
spatially-oriented disciplines (such as anthropology, area studies, archaeology,
and environmental history) that have more traditionally made use of these tools
and datasets and have, to greater and lesser extents, made peace with their
present limitations – a set of assumptions that underlie and circumscribe the
analytical and expressive power of geospatial information systems (GIS).
Instead, I want to extend our examination of GIS technologies and the
administrative, pedagogical, and scholarly publishing systems that support them
into the realm of interpretive literary and textual
studies – and imagine them at a variety of scales: from support for a
complex mapping of print-culture production and distribution networks through
space and time; to the visualization of subjective spatial expression in
historical and literary documents; to an examination of the spatial and
typographical features of a single page, or class of page designs. What
potential might geographical tools and methods have for illuminating the
spatial, semantic, and intertextual features of books as well as landscapes? Can
we imagine a next generation of these tools in support of visual and aesthetic
methodologies for very traditional (and, in some cases, only marginally geospatial) humanities interpretation?
If our aim is to promote, among colleagues in fields like literary studies and
digital history, a new and timely engagement with geospatial visualization as
interpretive practice (timely both in terms of the burgeoning
development and use of what have been called "vernacular" or
crowd-sourced spatial datasets and interfaces outside of the academy, and in the
context of a growing interest in a return to pragmatic, methodological training
in graduate education within it),
The deficiencies of existing geospatial applications and the social and academic
systems that support and promote their use have been adequately surveyed. Martyn
Jessop provides a thorough summary in the pages of LLC,
when he identifies four factors contributing to a strange "inhibition"
of the use of geospatial information among digital humanists, a community not
generally daunted by the need to learn new software tools, metadata standards,
and data curation practices (Jessop, M., 2008). The "first and most
fundamental" of these inhibiting factors "concerns the use of data
visualization and images per se in the discourse-based
research methodology of the humanities" (42). That most humanities
disciplines only make superficial use of images and image-based methodologies
suggests an opportunity, if not a need, to interrogate our habitual interpretive
practices and the ways in which graduate education perpetuates a longstanding
marginalization of the visual – particularly infelicitous in light of the
opportunities for production and analysis afforded by new media. Other factors
involve: the suitability of current geospatial software packages to the
treatment of issues like subjectivity and emotion, temporality as experienced
and expressed in the documentary record, or interpretive inflection in the
humanities; and those specific qualities of humanities information unsuited to
tools that have been designed for synchronic analysis of incredibly dense
datasets (rather than for sparse, temporally-inflected data) and with a
scientific eye toward filtering out – rather than celebrating and analyzing –
uncertainties or ambiguities. Finally, Jessop treats broader issues of scholarly
communication: issues in funding, producing, evaluating, and distributing
innovative geospatial scholarship in disciplines whose structures evolved in
response to different conditions and expectations. With Jessop, I will suggest
that, "although we usually think of GIS as a positivist tool its greatest
contribution to the humanities… may be not as an analytical or information
presentation tool but as a reflexive one," allowing us not only to engage
with the "highly experiential" and qualitative features of our
datasets, but also to reflect on how we construct our disciplines (46).
Frances Henshaw’s "Book of Penmanship" – a sophisticated, if naïve, 1820s pen-and-ink GIS – serves here as an example of both an illuminative process for, and a potential exemplar product of, a potential hermeneutic involvement on the part of scholars with textual surrogates and geospatial interfaces. We lack digital tools expressly crafted to promote the kind of ludic, iterative, graphical engagement with book design and geographical expression that is everywhere evident in the Henshaw cartifact. But the components of these tools are all around us. It is less a technical than an institutional and intellectual problem to identify the small pieces – and practices – that must be loosely joined in order for humanities scholars to move forward in the arena of geographic and textual graphesis, or knowledge-making through graphical expression (Drucker, 2001; 2009).
Is there a methodological approach that presents itself as a way to crack open
analytically – or perhaps just allow us to replicate and
play in digital environments with – the easy brand of
spatial and literary intertextuality evinced in Henshaw’s schoolgirl exercise? I
will look at a several classes of tools and digital humanities practices as a
way of getting at this question, including: the iterative, interpretive, and
structured sketching prototyped in Temporal Modelling (Drucker, J.D. and
Nowviskie, B., 2004) and Neatline;
Connecticut, one of 19 maps in Frances
Henshaw’s "Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female
Academy," 29 April 1823. Library of David Rumsey.
Descriptive and positional text accompanying
the Connecticut map; Frances Henshaw, 1823. Library of David
Rumsey..