News Flash from the ESSHC: “The European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) has added Historical GIS to its History and Computing network to create a new network provisionally called ‘Historical Computing and GIS.’ It is hoped that…this new network will become a focus for Historical GIS research in Europe. This new network will be launched at the next ESSHC conference which will take place in Ghent, Belgium 13-16th April 2010.”
For conference particulars, see here.
– Kelly Searsmith
Dear Map Historians:
To begin our new term, we would like to read and discuss Christian Jacob’s The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History at our next meeting–please mark your calendars for 7.30 p.m. on Wednesday March 3, place TBA. The book is a meditation on the meaning of maps–the author spends the first 90 pages pondering, “What is a map?”–this provocative and engaging text is a good place to go after Harley. We thought we would provide plenty of time to order and read copies. If you would like one, please let me know no later than this Friday, I need to place our entire order before the University of Chicago Press concludes its book sale. I would also like to use our blog, admirably maintained by Kelly, as a place to begin the discussion (http://historicalcartography.wordpress.com/) . . . please pay a visit to this site and sign up for an RSS feed that will alert you to new posts (if you have a google homepage and/or use google reader, this is easily done, even if you are new to the process).
As John Randolph’s project on Russian mobility and mine on the Cartography of American Colonization Database begin bearing fruit, expect at least one presentation on how some of the GIS tools we learned can be put to use. Sometime in early April, we will host Texas A&M historian April Hatfield, who will present a work-in-progress on the cartographic dimensions of English and Spanish contacts in the Americas. As always, we will give priority to any of you who wish to present something you are working on.
For those of you who attended our events last term, welcome back–those of you who haven’t, please feel free to join us whenever you can. To our students in History 502E (Spaces of Empire): you are very much welcome, but not required, to join us.
Best,
Max and Jovita
The Sovereign Map: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=159414
“Developing Cartographic Literacy with Historic Maps”
NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers
22 June to 10 July 2009 at the Newberry Library in Chicago
The Newberry Library’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography invites school teachers nationwide to apply for its 2009 NEH summer seminar, Developing Cartographic Literacy with Historic Maps, which will take place on June 22 – July 10, 2009. This 3-week seminar led by James Akerman (The Newberry Library) and Gerald Danzer (The University of Illinois at Chicago) is designed to develop cartographic literacy and encourage effective use of map documents in the classroom through study in the history of cartography. A program of seminars based on recent scholarship in the history of cartography and guided individual research will allow teachers to explore the relevance of map study to their own interests and curricular needs. Seminars and workshops will serve as forums for refining and applying the skills necessary to read maps as products of science, artistic creations, storytellers, wayfinding tools, and expressions of power; and as representations of worldviews and local landscapes.
Applications are encouraged from teachers of a broad range of courses and grade levels. Full-time K-12 educators working in public, private, and religiously-affiliated schools, as well as home-school educators in the United States or its territorial possessions are eligible; see the application guidelines for complete eligibility criteria.
Successful applicants will receive a stipend of $2,600 to help defray travel and housing expenses. Successful applicants may elect to receive CPDU credit, if eligible, for participation in this seminar. Completed applications must be postmarked no later than Monday, 2 March 2009.
Additional information and application materials are available at http://www.newberry.org/smith/summermaps.html or by contacting Sarah Frank, The Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, The Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St, Chicago IL 60610; email: franks@newberry.org, phone: 312–255–3659.
“Developing Cartographic Literacy with Historic Maps” is supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
–NEH Announcement, cross-posted by Kelly Searsmith
On December 4th, 2008, Izzy Cohen published a note about anthroporphic maps to The Humanist discussion group. I have requested Mr. Cohen’s permission to repost the entry here, so that others interested in the imaginative dimension of historical maps can be introduced to this concept and to the challenge of dealing quantitatively with maps of this kind. Examples may be viewed here: Holy Land & European Queen.
Mr. Cohen writes:
I learned about anthropomorphic maps from the linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford (deceased) and the anthropologist Stan Knowlton. They described the maps of Napi, the creator of the Blackfoot Indians (aka The Old Man) and his wife (The Old Woman) in Alberta, Canada. I “found” similar Phoenician maps of a male body (Hermes?) in west Asia and a female body (Aphrodite) in north Africa.
Anthropomorphic Maps
Anthropomorphic maps were generated by configuring the body of a god or goddess over the area to be mapped. The name of each part of that body became the name of the area under that part. This produced a scale 1:1 map-without-paper on which each place name automatically indicated its approximate location and direction with respect to every other place on the same map whose name was produced in this way.
You are cordially invited to join the BPMaps discussion group on this topic, a very quiet list that averages less than 2 messages per month. The URL is:http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps/
The Challenge: To produce computer software that will find additional body-part maps elsewhere in the world. Available inputs:
(1) geographic databases with ancient place names (e.g., the Perseus project).
(2) body-part names on Swadesh lists. Unfortunately, the navel is not included.
Attributes of Anthropomorphic Maps
(1) The navel is the center of the body, the center of the map, and usually the center of the map’s language community.
(2) Place names (toponyms) may be reversed, metathesized, misspelled or euphemized for various reasons.
(a) The same part in the same language exists on another map of a different body. [...] Aphrodite is looking backwards over her right shoulder. She is bent at her waist (Misr/Mitzraim = MoSNaiM).
(b) The left (sinister) part is altered in names for left-right pairs (arms, legs, eyes, ears). [...] SHvK = thigh with a T-sound for the letter shin = TvK reversed to Kuwait. [...]
(c) Names that represent taboo body parts or functions are reversed or euphemized.
Semitic PoS (female pudenda) reverses to yam SooF = sea of reeds (Red Sea).
[...]
ZaYiN = weapon (a euphemism for male member) is in Sinai as the desert of Zin.
(3) Names may be loan-translated due to conquest or language-change.
Roxolania (Semitic Ro[chs]SH = head) => Rus *( Ro@SH) => Ukraine (Greek kranion)
* Caused by a change in the sound of the aleph from CHS to a glottal stop. [...]
(4) Rivers and bodies of water may be named after bodily excretions.
[...] Gulf of Aqaba (Semitic QaVaH = digestion/defecation)
(5) Internal body parts may represent subdivisions of external parts.
[...] Goshen exported Arabic QuTN = cotton => Latin Gossypium (English gossamer = cotton-like) [...]
Atlas mountains < atlas = first cervical vertebra that supports the cranium.
(6) Islands near a body’s hands may be named for weapons.
[...] Sicily (< VL *sicila < Latin secula = sickle to harvest wheat; compare Semitic SaKiN = knife). [...]
Best regards,
Israel “izzy” Cohen
cohen.izzy@gmail.com
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps
–Kelly Searsmith
The Illinois GIS Association (which is housed at NIU) will be holding its Spring 2009 conference at the new I-Center Hotel and Conference Center here in Champaign. The CFP is now making the rounds.
ILGISA publishes a newsletter, Illinois GIS Notes, which can be found in back issues through Winter 2000 at the organization’s site.
Kelly Searsmith
I’m on a panel disucssing John Mitchell’s Map of North America this Wednesday at the National Archives. The map is also the subject of a great article by Matthew Edney in the current Imago Mvndi (v. 60, part 1, 2008). You can see it here, on my ereserves page. For a blurb about this panel and to view a copy of the map used to show the 1783 boundary between the United States and Britain, see this.
–Max Edelson
At our November meeting, the Map History Reading Group received training in ArcGIS software from ATLAS (UIUC’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Applied Technologies for Learning in the Arts and Science). Specifically, we learned the basics of ArcCat, which is used to manage geographical data, and ArcMap, which is used to visualize it. The data set used in the exercise was contemporary, local data that anyone in our campus community can readily grasp. The problems and pleasures of how to translate GIS technologies into historical projects are yet nebulous. We intend to pursue these at our next meeting.
As a preliminary reading on the subject, we are reviewing a practical primer in historical GIS written by Ian Gregory for the AHDS Guides in Good Practice series: A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research.
– Kelly Searsmith
Acadian Deportions, 1755-1768: Students of History 370 (Colonial US) at the University of Illinois plotted place names mentioned in a selection of primary documents “Relating to the Forcible Removal of the Acadian French from Nova Scotia.” The project was designed to encourage a precise, spatial retelling of this traumatic episode of the Seven Years’ War. Click the placemarkers for excerpts from the text. Thumbtacks denote especially important places. This is very easy to do using the “collaborate” button on Google Maps; with a click, the results can be projected on a Google Earth map.
A quotation especially for Election Day. H. G. Wells, in his The New Machiavelli (1911, available on Project Gutenberg) described a landslide general election in Britain seen from the perspective of the new machiavelli himself (who was standing for the Liberal).
“The London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded the nurseries. All the children of one’s friends had got big maps of England cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were busy sticking gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism that had hitherto submerged the country. And there were also orange labels, if I remember rightly, to represent the new Labour party, and green for the Irish.”
From a personal point of view, Wells’s use of colors is particularly appropriate!
Matthew Edney
The members of our Map History Reading Group have returned to our respective corners to think about what sort of GIS-based research we might do following our upcoming ATLAS training. I have been considering how I might employ GIS to map the Victorian fantastic, perhaps its regional characters. I have some question that won’t phrase itself about why that relationship might matter.
Which, as it turns out, is why I was struck by a Chronicle of Higher Education article on “Literary Geospaces” (8/1/08) that discusses two literature-related mapping projects that are well advanced (both were featured in a panel at last year’s December MLA Conference): Janelle Jenstad’s Map of Early Modern London and Matthew L. Jockers’s work on mapping or “georeferencing” the development of Irish-American literature. Although the article forswears the novelty of the digital humanities, and especially its secondary-stage applications such as GIS (too soon, far too soon), it’s worth a quick read for an introduction to “cultural geography,” in which we track and trace social and cognitive landscapes.
Will this new quantitative method of study lead to the new kind of reading that University of Nebraska digital humanist Stephen Ramsay supposes? Careful students of literature have long made spatial diagrams as well as temporal charts as they’ve read; we’ve been known to trace fictional and biographical journeys across maps of corresponding, actual terrains, too. That we can now add to these old methods much increased complexity and enhanced themes may indeed lead us to new insights. Whether that means a new way of reading (which I take to be theoretical rather than methodological), I doubt. Yet, I am eager to see this spectacle performed upon the disciplinary stage and to do some of the dancing across its glinting row of pinheads myself.
Kelly Searsmith
