Читать книгу Abstract Machine - Charles B. Travis - Страница 11

For centuries, maps were sketched painstakingly by hand with materials such as ink, papyrus, sheepskin, parchment, and paper. The transition from traditional forms of mapmaking to interactive, digital mapping platforms, such as GIS, began in the late twentieth century. In our age, geocoded digital images proliferate, conjured on plasma screens by fingertip strokes on cybernetic keyboards that parse signals from earth-orbiting satellites. In the 1970s, computer mapping introduced the first digital maps and automated the drafting process from the sketching table to the computer screen. In the 1980s, electronic database systems linked to digital maps, which allowed the visual display of multidimensional data variables and provided the foundation for many GIS systems operating today.

A geographic information system, or GIS, provides a digital platform upon which multiple map layers (called shapefiles and rasters) electronically stack on top of each other to create composite images. Each shapefile layer and its attendant data table display unique variables (represented as points, polylines, and polygons). Layers can also be composed of a pixelated terrain or map images called rasters. The GIS operator digitally manipulates the order of the stacked layers and associated data tables, creating any number of connections between the spatialized variables to produce composite mappings, visual representations, and spatial models for analysis.

GIS software offers the potential to orchestrate, analyze, and visualize spatial stories as numerous as the shapefile and data variable combinations GIS operators can make. Collectively, as David Staley notes,

Geographic information systems are one example of a suite of technologies—from data mining to immersive virtual reality displays to complex mathematical spaces—that have been collectively labelled “information visualizations.” A visualization is any graphic that organizes data into spatial forms for purposes of display, analysis, interpretation, and communication.²

Traditionally, GIS technology has engaged Cartesianism and Euclidian geometry with positivist methodologies to create what the historian Michel de Certeau describes as “a formal ensemble of abstract places.”³ Similar to cartographic tools that translate the perceptible world onto a legible tableau, GIS constitutes an “abstract machine” designed to create conceptual spaces in which users can collate and then quantify, geocode, and visualize singular events and larger patterns to produce a qualitative “collage of moments.”⁴ The space-time backgrounds created by this combination of cybernetic systems and software languages produce a “qualculative” world in which calculation is defined as not necessarily being precise and super-computing technologies, qualitative choices, and ambiguity empower users to explore place and write space in different ways, both literally and metaphorically.⁵ In this new world, GIS can be configured for use beyond positivistic endeavors and applied with innovation and imagination to the terrae incognitae of the humanities.

In this regard, a humanities GIS model provides a phenomenological tool that brackets events and patterns in both time and space. GIS can help users devise methodologies that are both quantitative (plotting geometric and numerical data relationships) and qualitative (juxtaposing attribute data relationships) to tackle important questions in literary, cultural, and historical studies. (See examples of the former in chapter 3 and the latter in chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7.) Whether a GIS is employed for quantitative or qualitative research, the selection of data involves a high degree of subjectivity—a trope with which arts and humanities scholars are conversant. Using GIS, these scholars can employ a spatial lens and apply many perspectives and analyses to any given subject by combining shapefile layers, data variables, and methodological approaches gathered from the sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

In the preface, GIS is defined as an “abstract machine.” For the humanities, the significance of this abstract machine lies in its potential to contextualize the system’s hardware and software nexus in a discipline that employs human and electronic cybernetic systems to advance our understanding of physical and social systems.⁶ According to Donna Haraway, the cybernetic perspective of the late twentieth century emerged when innovators began to theorize human interactions with technology and fabricate the machine-organism hybrids called cyborgs.⁷ This perception encouraged a mass proliferation of cybernetic assemblages that technologically disrupted Western ontologies and epistemologies. Far from being deterministic or dystopian, however, “cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves ... it means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.”⁸ At its basic level, GIS constitutes a language of abstractions—a spatialized and cyber syntax articulated by cyborg authors who digitally reproduce perceptions of physical and social systems in codescapes of algorithmic, computerized commands.

This capacity suggests a cybernetic map—to parse Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s aphorism, in which “there is no longer the tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book)”—or the map—“and a field of subjectivity (the author)”—or the mapmaker.⁹ The digital architecture of GIS software can be considered as an abstract machine that deterritorializes an individual’s phenomenological sense of place by geometrically projecting idiosyncratic perceptions of the environment onto a coordinated grid system. The result is an abstract space that can be navigated, mapped, and studied. This is the dominant spatial perspective, epistemology, and methodology employed by most GIS practitioners. However, from a post-structural perspective, GIS can be conceived as a topographical hermeneutic system operating on an inter-textual platform that employs a spatial and cyber syntax to produce the postmodern notion of a digitally visualized mapping text. As discussed more fully in chapter 2, we can employ GIS to explore and survey “rhizomatic” spatial relationships and networks linking literary, historical, and cultural scales and networks on multidimensional levels (figure 1.2).

In Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, GIS constitutes an abstract machine that scholars use to pilot through space that does not represent something real so much as it constructs a reality that is yet to come.¹⁰ This concept suggests not only an image-making technology but, more importantly, a technology that facilitates information transfer, knowledge production, and communication. GIS orchestrates a chain of practices and processes that gathers geographical information and constructs imaginative geographies.¹¹ The paths that a humanities-oriented GIS may follow, therefore, are many.

Figure 1.2 Rhizome—the space of conjecture, as envisioned in a transport map blueprint of a city illustrating “rhizomatic” spatial relationships and networks. Courtesy of Kentoh/Shutterstock.com.