Guildenstern: What a shambles! We’re just not getting anywhere.
Rosencrantz: Not even England. I don’t believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?
I actually wrote this as a comment in Ken’s blog, but knowing that there’s a better chance of getting more replies if I post it as a blog entry than there is if I post it as a comment, I’ll repeat myself here:
Another issue I had with "online atlases" is trying to understand what constitutes an online atlas. The atlas is very much a product of bookbinding. The binding makes the atlas– otherwise it’s just a collection of maps. Which is what the Rumsey collection felt like to me– a collection of maps. (Seriously, though– I know it’s in the name, but that didn’t occur to me until I was typing this.)
What elements could be included to make an online atlas more than a collection of maps? To "bind" the maps together, even if it is in a nonlinear fashion? What work do atlases do, other than keeping our maps from getting all over the place? And is it worth the work, both conceptual and time in doing the design, to make an "online atlas" proper? Or is a collection of maps enough?
I’ve looked at a bunch of Historical Atlases over the last couple weeks. I’m just going to comment on four that seemed especially worthy of comment, for good or ill.
The first one I looked at was an atlas I discovered this summer– Donald Cole’s Atlas of American History. Published in 1963 and created by the head of the History Department at Phillips Exeter, the book has a lot to recommend it. It’s a great account of major events in American History, and has a decent amount of textual explication of events– I’d say the book averages about 65% text and 35% maps. In this way, the book was the easiest of those I looked at to "read" in a traditional, linear prose manner. It reads like a traditional introductory American History textbook, with a strong eye to the geographic. Given the author’s profession, working at a prep school, I’d guess that’s exactly the text’s goal. And it works quite well.
For those of us who may be somewhat past the need for a high school History text, however, the book still works. The very strictly chronological ordering of the book and the clear, easily legible maps make it a useful reference when you want to re-orient yourself within a particular area of the US at a particular time. It’s also, given its age, a primary source of its own: I found it fascinating to look at the "contemporary issues" at the end of the book and find the partitioned nation of Vietnam and maps of states that had integrated public schools.
A note on design: this book is straightforward with few embellishments and a very limited palate of black, white, grey, salmon, and brown, which makes it quite nice as far as quick reference and fast comprehension of visual data. There is one embellishment that I really enjoyed, however: the edges of each page that contains a map are scored with a grid, much like on a map, with A, B, C, etc. along the top and 1, 2, 3… along the side of the page. While not strictly functional, I really like this small stylistic embellishment, as it seems to me to serve to remind the reader to place primacy on geography and space: this is not merely a heavily-illustrated textbook of American History, it’s a book that places History within geographic context.
The next book I’d like to discuss is Dan Bahat’s 1983 Carta’s Historical Atlas of Jerusalem. What really struck me about this book is the use of scale. While the book covers 4000 years of history, it is limited to one relatively small city. Because of this, the book is able to give street maps of the same area over time, and to provide floorplans of buildings of note. I found this especially cool, because it comes closer to the everday understanding of space and place that I think is so important when looking at the experiences of historical actors. You learn a lot more about everyday life from looking at the layout of a particular city and its inhabitants than from looking at a map of the US where each state is colored according to its percentage of black mayors.
The book is easily the wordiest of those I’ve looked at, when you look at the use of page-space, it’s hard not to notice a 75/25 word-to-picture ratio. And while the clean, sparse visuals of Cole’s American History felt simple, clean, and utilitarian, this atlas felt dry, dull, and sparsely illustrated. On the positive side, however, one thing I appreciated was that the maps of the city in different ages were overlaid on a topographical map, creating a good sense of changing urban geography over the (comparatively) unchanging landscape.
By far the weakest atlas I looked at was the 1986 Harper Atlas of World History. The book manages to be visually overloaded yet dull– I can’t quite account for how they managed that paradox.
The bottom quarter or so of the book is a timeline, which reflects an incredibly incongruous view of time, as something that skips back and forth and constantly slows. the same amount of space that accounts for 500 years in the early sections of the book accounts for maybe twenty years toward the end.
Likewise, there are strange lacunae in space and time all over the place. Virtually everything before the Common Era takes place in the middle east, a region that then disappears until the late nineteenth century. Chinese history takes the form of eruptions in the fabric of time, always requiring the reader to jump back five hundred years and get caught up to the present, before panning back to the West for another hundred pages. Native Americans are seen migrating to this hemisphere in the earliest maps, which are more "natural history" than history proper, accounting for the origin of man and the like, and then nothing happens on this hemisphere until 1492. The only maps of Indian lands are those that depict them in retreat from arriving Westerners. Apparently nothing happened outside of Egypt on the continent of Africa until the rise of European colonization.
Maybe "World History" is too broad a topic for a single-volume atlas. I don’t doubt that. But that’s just an unforgivable design flaw, not an excuse. And it’s hardly the only design flaw.
Finally, I’d like to talk about my favorite of the bunch– Derek Hayes’s Historic Atlas of the United States (With Original Maps).
Where the first two atlases I’ve discussed were rather colorless, and the Harper atlas was eye-bleedingly badly designed, Hayes has obviously paid the most attention to design. Each page is colored a muted tone, giving the entire experience of reading this book a more aesthetic feeling. Where the other books used contemporary maps to show historical data, this book uses the maps from the historical moment being discussed, allowing you to look at the impact of cartography and historical actors’ understanding of geography. Competing land claims in Colonial America look, in Cole’s book or the Harper atlas, like simply conflicts over domain. Hayes’s use of historical maps reminds us that part of the issue was that these colonizers didn’t fully understand the land, that they didn’t completely know what they were claiming.
The use of colored pages, the careful attention to legible page layouts, and the use of historical maps all come together to create a very different "reading" experience– one that is closer to the experience of entering a salon-style gallery than the prose-reading style of the first two atlases above, or the visual confusion of the Harpers disaster. The eye scans, goes from map to map, settles here and there. It is a book that rewards browsing, flitting about, leafing through time and space.
This is not to say that the book is all style and no substance, or that it represents an aesthetization of map at the expense of real information. First off, one must repeat the constantly-heard but only occasionally heeded maxim that visual data is still data, and that a preference for visual data over the written word can still be information-rich. But the design also does something quite clever to overcome such logocentric critiques. The captions to accompany the images are much longer and more in-depth than those in any other historical atlas I looked at, and are positioned near, but not simply below, the maps in question.
Thus the experiencing of reading the book takes on an almost fractal quality. One’s eyes at first flit about, finally settling on some map that possesses some eye-catching quality– a "strange attractor" if you will. From there, curiosity piqued, they quickly land on the caption, and are given a contextualization of the image. With that new information, you may go back to the image, and your eyes eventually move onto another nearby image– one that is related in some way. You read the caption to this new map. Eventually, your curiosity may be satisfied, or you may move on to reading the prose essay that is woven throughout the section.
The effect is nonlinear, and quite pleasing. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure atlas, made up of three nested layers of "essays," in a specific hierarchy. First is the visual essay made by the juxtaposition, relations, placement, and contents of the maps. The secondary level is a micro-essay of commentary on the visual data, which takes the form of the maps’ captions. Finally, you have the layer of the prose essay within each section.
A section that embodies this reading experience quite well is the two-page spread on "Seas Where They Ought Not Be." The title of the section is superimposed over a map of California as a large island– a persistent and curious phenomenon I’d definitely noticed on old maps before. From there the eye sails down to the Hudson Bay Company’s map of the continent as almost a large archipelago, then diagonally up to the depiction of the Sea or Bay of the West, a large inland sea that consumes most of the Pacific Northwest. One then begins to wonder what’s going on here, and reads some of the captions, followed by looking at the less visually striking maps, going to their captions to see why they’re included, and finally settling on the interspersed essay for a broader view.
The fonts of the captions and the prose essay are significantly different enough to easily distinguish between the two, and the subtle cream color of the pages compliments the colors in many of the aged, yellowed maps. Certain images bleed off the page, creating visual interest before allowing the eye to move on to the next image, and also creating a method of cropping to the most interesting elements that has a bit more flare than a simple square crop. The placement of the maps is not a simple grid, thus creating visual interest, but remains simple enough to avoid the confusion engendered by the Harper atlas’s cartographic and pictorial clutter.
I really like this one, if you can’t tell.
Finally, while I’ve limited my discussion to books with "Atlas" in the title, I’d like to mention Whitehall and Kennedy’s Boston: A Topographical History, a book that uses a lot of visual data to compliment a textual interpretation of the changing topography of an urban landscape. It doesn’t fit neatly into the tradition of the Atlas, as the images are secondary to the text, but it integrates both quite well, and is a great example of how geography itself can have a history.
Online citation techniques are a pain. None of them work perfectly, they often require special html hacks or the like, and getting shiny things like rollovers to work for that mythical little old lady out in the middle of nowhere who still uses dialup and IE 2 is pretty much impossible.
But hope springs eternal for those of us who hang on every word that Google Labs decide to put out into the ether. The newest bit I’ve come across is especially exciting– a way to include direct HTML links to scans of out-of-copyright books using Google Books.
This is great. You want to encourage people to check your quotations and assertions? You can now provide a quick and painless link. I think there’s a lot of possibilities for teachers who use class-based blogs with their students, too.
I’m a little reluctant to get too happy, as Google’s not been the best at recognizing the out-of-copyright status of certain texts, especially (and especially annoyingly) things that were written and published initially to be in the public domain, but may not be 100 years old, like certain government documents, or things published by those who eschew copyright on moral grounds. But it’s good news, nonetheless, and I can’t wait to play with it and see what I can get out of this improved functionality to Google Books.
(Thanks to the folks over at Blogging Pedagogy for making me aware of this…)
The new History Carnival went up last week, and it features a really interesting article on a map of the US– in terms of Major League Baseball Teams.
Just thought some of you might be interested…
I’m not an Historian.
At least, not yet.
I’ll tell people this proudly, because I think it means I’m not coming at this project with any artificially "naturalized" concepts– I like to think I don’t have as many assumptions about what history is or how one goes about it. This is because academically, I’m not from an historical background. And I honestly just don’t completely grok what people talk about when they talk about history. Since coming to George Mason, though, I’ve been trying to work through what it means.
But sometimes someone will say something that makes me realize that I have fairly definite beliefs, or at least suspicions, about what I think History is– or should be. These moments are wonderful, because sometimes my beliefs come crashing down, and other times they’re reaffirmed, but these moments are always times when I realize that I’m starting to become an historian– to become someone who cares deeply and holds strong opinions about the nature and methods of Historical work.
A couple of the students in my Historiography course last semester kept bringing up the idea of history as a science. This seemed, to me at the time, to be patently ridiculous. Science means reproducible results, controlled experimentation, objectivity (a term I’m so loath to use that I almost always write it bracketed or under erasure or in scare quotes)… History is simply not like that, I felt.
History is interpretive, it’s subjective. It’s narratizing. The way that it’s done in the academy today, History is something deeply intertextual– it takes place in the footnotes, dialogically. When you look to the origins of historical writing, it doesn’t come out of the sciences, it comes out of the tradition of bards, chronicles, and heraldry. It’s a poetic tradition.
Moreover, there’s the problem of sources. Sciences are, I thought, the product of direct observation. Most of History’s sources are just textual traces, documentary remnants from unreliable narrators. When we write history, we do so placing trust in those sources. We may have standards of critical skepticism, we may demand plausibility and require that sources support one anothers’ assertions, but we essentially are interpreting texts, and when we talk about History in terms of "reality," we’re really placing a lot of trust in our sources or our own critical faculties.
I’m starting to open up to the idea that there are strong similarities between History and certain scientific disciplines. One reason for that is a conversation with a friend from my old alma mater– who is, incidentally, also a Mason grad. In a conversation over the summer, talking about History over Thai food in DuPont, he presented a quite strong argument for History as a Science. I wasn’t converted, but it was the first time someone made the argument so convincingly to me. I’ll talk more about that conversation in a later post.
But the argument made by John Lewis Gaddis in The Landscape of History is what I want to talk about here. Gaddis’s book is one of the most incredibly clever books I’ve read in a long time. And I mean "clever" in both the complimentary and pejorative sense of the term.
Gaddis argues that History is much closer in its approaches to Physics or Evolutionary Biology than to the Social Sciences– History, like those "hard sciences," is deductive, multicausal, complex. It’s a strong argument.
But like Gaddis’s entire book, it’s also deeply metaphorical. The whole book is awash in strange metaphors– my favorite being the image of the SS Jaques Derrida bearing down on the British coastline. And this is part of the insight of the book– that scientific insight is often deeply metaphorical. It’s thought experiments, insights gained from suddenly recalling the image of the snake that eats its own tail.
So I would say that Gaddis influenced my oppinion insofar as he has helped convince me that History is like many sciences. I’m just not completely convinced that it falls into the category of science, that it IS Science.
Of course, I’m biased. I don’t want History to be a Science. I’m not interested in being a scientist. I came to History because I wanted a way to do the kind of textual interpretation and theory that I came to love in college… and make it Mean Something. Because I sort of stopped believing, after a certain point, that Joyce changed the world. But I can’t believe that William Randolf Hearst didn’t.
I love the idea of History as the Art of the Footnote. As a practice of navigating between texts, sailing through a sea of traces and scraps of the past. I know that Historians can’t throw out the concept of Historical Truth, but I don’t want to stop asking why. Many people seem to feel that microhistory represents the postmodernization of historical practices, but I don’t know if that project goes far enough. I want to see Derridian history– history that attacks the authority to make Historical Truth Statements. I know that this sort of project would quickly become tiresome and difficult and of questionable utility, as Derrida’s work itself did, but I think that it would only strengthen History as a discipline. I think Historians need to make the postmodern turn, if only to turn away from it.
And, as a final note, I do want to add that if there is one criticism I would have of Gaddis’s book, it would be that– I think he sets the social sciences up as a bit of a straw man, creating an unfair comparison between more contemporary Historical Theory and a fairly Modernist, mid-twentieth century view of what the social sciences "do." From some of the sociologists I’ve met, I get the feeling that they’re further along in making the postmodern turn than a lot of Historians. (Of course, the handful of Economists I’ve talked to have seemed to fit fairly well within his characterization of that discipline.)
I have a lot more to say, and I know that this is somewhat muddled. But I’m trying to tease out an argument, a way of explaining what I think, or at least suspect, when it comes to the theory of History, the philosophy of history, whatever you want to call it.
So… More thoughts on this later.
I’ve been neglecting my poor blog. I feel bad for it.
As I intend to keep this blog going for a while, I’ve decided to import my posts on different readings for my Historiography course last semester. They may not represent my finest work, but I hope that– at the very minimum– keeping them somewhere easily findable will be helpful come oral exams.
I have to say, I’m somewhat surprised that this book didn’t seem to invite more controversy in my historiography class…
The issue of agency among the oppressed is one that has come up several times in discussions for this class, and has proven quite contentious each time. Some in the class welcome models that give agency to those in oppressive situations or in states of subjection, and others find it to be overly optimistic, pie in the sky thinking, that can be used as justification to blame the victim.
Given that, when I realized that our reading for this week was a book about gender relations in which the author discusses domestic violence at length, and that Stern posits that degrees of contestation and complicity can be found on both sides of the gender line, I expected a flurry of responses to show up on WebCT on the
topic.
Maybe it’s a stroke of good fortune that this book comes on the reading list in the midst of the end-of-semester crunch. I wasn’t really looking forward to a tempest in a teapot. That said, I feel that Stern, throughout this book, presents through his example a very well-made argument for the position that even in the face of oppression, violence, and denial of many civil or human rights, people find ways to exercise their own agency and negotiate their situations.
These negotiations don’t end in ideal solutions—indeed, in the very first case study offered in the book, it ends in manslaughter. Nevertheless, the book’s thesis is founded on the belief that infrapolitical response and
negotiation can be found even in dire circumstances—and that in some examples at least, these resistances and contests for the meaning of hegemonic discourse can lead to favorable (if contingent and based on compromise) results.
Perhaps the argument being couched in domestic relations is part of the reason for the lack of controversy—people may be more comfortable understanding that certain degrees of negotiation occur within the family or household, where they may be less comfortable ascribing agency to (to use examples from a previous conversation) black slaves or people in concentration camps. However, if this is the case, it’s somewhat surprising as the book is throughout haunted by the specter of violence against women.
Another possibility is that it’s simply the strength of Stern’s argument, coupled with his seemingly exhaustive cataloging of case study after case study. I think this is one of the book’s main strengths. It becomes much harder to dismiss the notion of agency among subjugated women when the author couples strong theory with powerful, personal accounts of various individuals and the ways they dealt with, contested, toed the line of, challenged, or even rejected dominant notions of masculine superiority and the power of paterfamilias.
In doing so, he was also able to carefully avoid ascribing to these women any sort of anachronistic overt (or even proto-) feminism. They didn’t reject the basic ideology of patriarchy, but asserted themselves in contests over its meaning, its limits, and its extent.
Despite the rather grim subject matter, I was so impressed with Stern as both a writer and a scholar that I found this book to be one of the most enjoyable we’ve read all semester.
First off, I had to post this when I found it: apparently, Nial Ferguson was so impressed by the Calm and the Storm that he went and got a job with them. It’s not really a conflict of interests or anything, but I found it very interesting.
That said, I’m still not loving Myst. I’m not exactly an avid gamer, but I do enjoy some games in moderation. I’m not one of those anti-video game people. But I do not find Myst particularly enjoyable.
I’m still trying to beat it, though, as Prof. P promises that there’s payoff at the end… I doubt it, though.
While reading the Gee article, it occurred to me that Gee has this almost platonic ideal of the “good video game,” which he then contrasts with a bad classroom. But his thinking about what good video games are made me realize that Myst falls short.
Yeah, I said it: Myst is not a good video game.
I’m not going to belabor the point, but a couple of principles of “good video games” that Myst V (the version I’m playing) violates:
Oh– and just another desultory thought, here… Where do walk-throughs stand in terms of academic honesty and honor codes? Is it more like plagiarism, or more like a study guide?
Responses:
