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In Geographies of Modernism (2005), Andrew Thacker and Peter Brooker note the recent, strong interest in the geographical and spatial dimensions that shape and are represented in literary and cultural texts.¹ Arguably, the roots of Western geographical thought and cartographical practice spring from the entwined branches of literary, artistic, and scientific pursuits; etymologically speaking, the word geography derives from the Greek word for “earth writing” (geo = “earth,” graphein = “writing”). With imagination, humanities scholars can engage GIS as a prosthetic device to survey the terrae incognitae of historical, aesthetic, and cultural “textual spaces.” A brief history of Western geographical thought and cartographical practice reveals few precedents for reconciling these spaces and their diverse artistic, narrative, and scientific genealogies in a humanities GIS model.

Herodotus (484–25 BC) and Strabo (63 BC–ca. 24 AD) sifted through a vast storehouse of travelers’ tales, separating fact from fiction and retelling the stories they thought were credible enough to claim a reader’s attention.² In doing so, they contributed to defining one branch of geography as a narrative and idiographic discipline anchored in ethics and politics. In contrast, Eratosthenes (276–195 BC) and Ptolemy (90–168 AD) employed mathematics to calculate the spherical nature of the earth and develop early map projections that helped to establish a branch of geography as a type of “geometry with names,”³ foreshadowing modern attempts to establish nomothetic practices in cartography and geography. Initially, “the geographer’s science and storyteller’s art could not be fully detached from each other.”⁴ Soon enough, a clash developed between them:

An academic controversy was waged over the reliability of geographical data in Homer’s Odyssey. Strabo, who believed the Odyssey to be authentic and reliable, in a long and controversial passage leveled criticism against Eratosthenes for holding that Homer should be read as a poet and not as a scientific authority.⁵

Tensions and debates between the discipline’s positivistic and poetic strands shaped the evolution of Western geographical thought and cartographical practice. A humanities GIS model may provide common ground.

Michel de Certeau (1925–86) observed that medieval and early modern mapmakers narrated spatial stories and histories by mapping religious pilgrimages and crusades, which they often experienced personally. They embellished their maps with the traces of footprints and alongside them illustrated the successive events that took place in the course of their journeys, such as meals, battles, mountains, and river crossings. In this regard, mapmakers acted as tour guides, visually interpreting their experiences and the plots of navigators with traditional geographical knowledge (such as Ptolemy’s Geography) into representations conveying the reason and manner for which the maps were created (figure 2.2).

However, de Certeau notes, “between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the map became more autonomous”⁶ and eliminated such pictorial embellishments. Transformed by Euclidian and descriptive geometry, maps began to constitute an ensemble of “abstract spaces,” in which a unitary sense of projection subsumed the mapmaker’s experience and traditional geographical knowledge within its theatrical frame. Now, maps collate “on the same plane heterogeneous places, some received from a tradition and others produced by observation.”⁷ Over time, by erasing the itinerary and idiosyncratic perspective of the human tour guides who created it, the map began to “colonize space,” producing “a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin” were “brought together to form the tableau of a ‘state’ of geographical knowledge.”⁸ In short, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, abstract projections gradually effaced the idiosyncratic perspective and experience of the mapmaker.

Figure 2.2 The North Sea—medieval spatial stories (map fragment, 1572). Courtesy of Sergey Mikhaylov/Shutterstock.com.

During this period, John Pickles notes, two scopic regimes dominated the arts and sciences in Europe. One developed through the use of Cartesian perspectivalism, which allowed 3D spaces and linear perspective to be depicted together in two dimensions on a flat surface. This regime fixed visual representation within a coordinated grid.⁹ In 1425, the Italian artist Filippo Brunelleschi performed a “feat of magic” in a cathedral piazza in Florence when he demonstrated the optical illusion created by the vanishing point in a painting. His innovative technique had “irreversible implications for the entire future of western art.”¹⁰ The other scopic regime, associated with the descriptive school in seventeenth-century Dutch art, sought to develop techniques for representing a phenomenological view of the world in two dimensions.¹¹ This fostered a “mapping impulse” in both Dutch painting and cartography concerned with representing the world in an intelligible and accessible manner for the public good.¹²

Perspectivalism offered mapmakers a homogeneous space regulated by a grid-like network of coordinates that created theatrical “scenographic” representations. According to Pickles, particular forms of parametric space, geometry, and scale anchored this modern cartographic gaze and subjected cartography to a controlling epistemological perspective that miniaturized and universalized the world’s enormous complexities for discrete purposes.¹³ In distinction to cartography, however, geography remained a wide field of knowledge until and during the Enlightenment, R. J. Mayhew asserts, rather than a closed and controlling discipline. Because geography and literature acted as more permeable categories in the eighteenth century, many geographers continued to pursue interests comparable to that which we now consider literary.¹⁴ This flexibility set a precedent for scholars working to conceptualize a GIS model that creatively synthesized approaches in the humanities and sciences. However, as Brian Harley observes, Western cartographical practices since the seventeenth century have propagated a standardized scientific model of knowledge that produces a “correct” relational model of the terrain being mapped.¹⁵ Consequently, cartography became a scientific, empirically based profession that embraced the practices of classification, quantification, and instrumentation.

Over the next two centuries, governments, states, and nations established institutions to conduct surveys and produce maps and topographical records of the territories and colonies they possessed and controlled. Statistical mapping grew into an important tool for government bureaucracy, and map use and interpretation practices widely disseminated to schools and other institutions for the sake of social regulation.¹⁶ During the nineteenth century, geography lost some of its permeability with other fields as it became institutionalized as a discipline in Britain, Europe, and the United States. Along with cartography, geography began to serve the interests of nation and empire in utilitarian and ideological manners. The “Darwinian Revolution” and “Neo-Lamarckianism” (beliefs about the organic roots of genetic factors in the environment) influenced the development of “environmental determinism,” a now discredited pseudo-scientific geographical perspective arguing that peoples’ regional environments determined racial and cultural differences. Meanwhile, as Neil Smith observes, the conflation of geography, cartography, and the ideology of imperialism shaped British geographer Halford Mackinder’s concepts of the “world-island” and the “geographical pivot of history” as well as US historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s “end of the frontier” thesis on the settlement and closure of the American West. However, such perspectives also raised a few questions. If geographers had entirely mapped, enumerated, and described all the world’s cultures, territories, and nations—“relegating geography to the realm of the fixed”—then what purpose and further utility could the discipline offer? Indeed, fears of “the end of geography” at the end of the nineteenth century, fostered by a chimerical belief in the “closure of absolute space provoked powerful ideological effects” in many political and academic circles.¹⁷

As Smith notes, the era spanning the 1880s through the early 1920s stands out as a time of political and economic turmoil and a transformation in culture and science. These four decades marked unprecedented creativity and the development of new concepts and ways of considering the world.¹⁸ During this period, modernist literature, music, art, and architecture developed, and, just as profoundly, the apprehension and depiction of space and time became inseparably interlinked, notes Henri Lefebvre. The shock waves of this seismic cultural shift first reverberated through intellectual and artistic spheres, where the old “clock-work universe” formulae of space and time dissolved in the face of Einstein’s mind-bending theory of relativity. In the works of Paul Cézanne and the school of analytical cubism, perceptible space and perspective disintegrated as the line of horizon disappeared from paintings.¹⁹ Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica illustrates this shift in perception (figure 2.3).

In geography, Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975) and the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography developed a new methodological lens based on a cultural concept of landscape that rejected the idea of environmental determinism. Sauer’s morphological studies of regions and societies placed particular emphasis on the temporal dimension of a panoramic lens:

We cannot form an idea of landscape except in terms of its time relations as well as it space relations. It is in continuous process of development, or of dissolution and replacement.²⁰

The school emphasized a synchronic approach to researching and mapping historical, cultural, and physical landscapes. Although empirically oriented in his methodology, Sauer recognized the significant role that subjective perception played in creating distinct “senses of place” rooted in the phenomenological symbiosis existing between particular regions and cultures.

Figure 2.3 The ruins of space and time: Czechoslovakian postage stamp of Picasso’s Guernica. Stamp image courtesy vvoe/Shutterstock.com. Stamp shows Guernica painting by Pablo Picasso from Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (ca. 1967).

Nevertheless, twentieth-century cartography remained anchored in Euclidean geometry, even as intellectual and artistic praxes moved toward Einsteinian concepts of time-space.²¹ These parallel tracks, which resembled the approaches of Cartesian perspectivalism and the seventeenth-century Dutch mapping impulse, manifested as two distinct schools of geographic practice. The former gave birth to the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, with its emphasis on spatial modeling and computing, while the latter shaped geography’s second cultural turn during the 1970s and 1980s, during which humanistic and postmodern scholars applied the metaphor of text to the acts of reading landscapes, conducting fieldwork, and framing social life.²²