Читать книгу Abstract Machine - Charles B. Travis - Страница 17

As a result of the spatial turn in the humanities, the word mapping became a discursive metaphor that scholars employed to discuss the spaces and places that shaped literary and historical texts and were represented in them. By establishing humanities GIS models, scholars can now explore, survey, chart, map, and navigate textual journeys in a literal sense. Traditionally, under the umbrella of spatial science, users employed GIS to map distributions and patterns but engaged little in mapping the lyrical, subjective, temporal, and esoteric notions of place and human experience. The predominant positivistic perspective encounters a greater challenge in performing qualitative analysis and visualizing critical theoretical relationships in GIS, as well as captures the dynamic nature of evolving networks, the cascade of historical events, and the myriad social flows that interlink people and places.³²

By adopting postmodern approaches, however, we can use GIS technology to create unique opportunities to construct alternate constructions of history and culture that embrace multiplicity, simultaneity, complexity, and subjectivity.³³ By placing historical and cultural exegesis more explicitly in space and time, GIS can identify patterns, facilitate comparisons, enhance perspectives, and visualize data in any number of ways. Currently, humanities-influenced methodologies are taking GIS technology beyond the limits imposed by positivism. Examples include “deep-mapping” techniques and approaches that engage oral cultures and storyscapes, detect semiotic traces on landscapes, and provide experiential interfaces with virtual data and immersive geospatial environments.

The writer William Least Heat Moon (William Trogdon) first conceptualized deep mapping as a vertical form of travel writing in his book PrairyErth (1991). This approach both records and represents the grain and patina of place through the interpenetrations and juxtapositions of the past and the present, the political and the poetic, and the discursive and the sensual.³⁴ David Bodenhamer asserts that using GIS deep-mapping methodologies to fuse qualitative and quantitative data acknowledges the reality of multi-scalar and dynamic space-time.³⁵ GIS techniques can assemble and visualize layers with different degrees of transparency to integrate oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, and natural history.³⁶ Similarly, Mark Palmer, in his work on Kiowa oral culture and storyscapes, coined the neologism indigital GIS to describe networks of indigenous, scientific, and technological knowledge systems that engage science, symbols, and stories to create fragmentary and contradictory geo-narratives full of uncertainties.³⁷ Researchers phonetically coded Kiowa and Latin alphabets into geodatabases to create maps that trace everyday paths by combining remote-sensing images and data from the Internet. This shape-shifting through GIS allows users to dramatize Kiowa oral culture and storyscapes that present long-elapsed events that unfold as if before one’s eyes and summarily strips away a type of historical theater of the past.³⁸ By integrating Kiowa language, perceptions of terrain, seasons, the solar cycles, and the Milky Way in a dynamic and holistic fashion as geo-narrative art, Palmer’s GIS storyscape techniques—with its many kinds of fusion, interbreeding, and boundary crossing—illustrate the direction of digital mapping.³⁹

In addition, Wolfgang Moschek and Alexander von Lünen have engaged GIS as a means to semiotically track and interpret the ruins of limes, ancient Roman border fortifications located in Britain, as signs of a cultural mentality inscribed on the landscape to delineate perceived “civilized” and “barbaric” spaces.⁴⁰ Von Lünen argues that while positivists interpret such sources as open windows into the past, postmodernists perceive them as fences obstructing vision.⁴¹ Modeling semiotic data in GIS resembles the early stages of tracking, through which a postmodern detective (fictional or actual) identifies and interprets clues to understand how their sources speak.⁴² Once clues are assembled and parsed, GIS is engaged—not as a cartographical tool but rather as the intuitive scratchpad of a bricoleur—to encode scanned archival maps with clues that semiotically transform the signified source into an active and present historical signifier. Semiotic GIS techniques allow the practitioner to arrange and elicit signifier-signified meanings and intentions in human traces (records, documents, artifacts), rather than simply analyze established historical narratives.⁴³

Last, Trevor Harris has created a visualization-gaming platform called The Cave, which immerses users in GIS-rendered landscapes, such as nineteenth-century Morgantown, West Virginia, to facilitate a phenomenological experience of a different environment, period, and place. Similar to the holodeck from Star Trek, this experiential form of GIS projects 3D models of townscapes and terrains—sourced from cartographical, archival, scientific, census, and literary data—on the walls, floor, and ceiling of an enclosed space. Individual users can then navigate the virtual environment to explore the fully rendered visualization from their own perspectives. To foster a user’s sensual embodiment of the streets of Morgantown two centuries ago, Harris integrates sound effects, such as a beating heart that quickens as one navigates near townscape locations identified by nineteenth-century writers and historians as places of perceived fear or danger.⁴⁴ This type of immersive, experiential GIS environment also enables individuals and groups to create their own forms of visualization by interacting experimentally with virtualized spatial data.⁴⁵

The preceding examples of humanities-based applications illustrate that GIS is not a fixed or singular identity but instead a technology that, with creativity and innovation, we can reconceptualize and retool to conduct more qualitative, lyrical, artistic, esoteric, and phenomenological forms of research.⁴⁶ These examples also show how the strong influence of humanities disciplines on GIS innovation can provide a new and ontologically different reality to geography itself.⁴⁷ Furthermore, these GIS models considered in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can provide a space of conjecture in which to reconcile the literary, artistic, and scientific roots of geography as well as provide a way to reimagine the potential of geospatial technology applications and research for humanities scholarship.