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According to Deleuze and Guattari, both mapping and writing possess the power to anticipate and reimagine configurations of space, time, language, and culture, which have either been submerged by Cartesian space or yet to be perceived and represented. In their books, “one has the sense that there is only geography, nothing but geography: maps, planes, surfaces, strata, spaces, territories, transversals, etc.”⁴⁸ Their conception of striated and smooth space links, respectively, to arborescent and rhizomatic forms of epistemology. Deleuze and Guattari use the first term to describe hierarchical, finite, and closed systems of thought and representation and invoke the rhizome as a curling, anarchic, subterranean plant root system to illustrate the interconnectivities that link society, writing, technology, and the human mind. Subsequently, a few creatively minded geographers have used this metaphor to manage the messiness of interactions and interconnections between human and physical systems.⁴⁹

Pickles and Harley observed that cartography originally developed as a particularly controlling gaze, tied to certain forms of parametric space, geometry, and scale, which by the nineteenth century had developed into an empirical “scientific” practice anchored firmly by positivistic perspectives. However, Harley notes that the “steps in making a map—selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and ‘symbolization’—are inherently rhetorical.”⁵⁰ With the advent of GIS technology, the infusion of humanities practices and discourses of postmodernism into the syntax of cartography has significantly changed the discipline to allow new concepts to develop. In this respect, GIS appears to function as a type of automated rhetorical tool. William Cartwright notes:

Clicking icons, rather than remembering long, alphanumeric strings revolutionized the way in which users interacted with a package. To properly understand each of the elements in a geographical information package, a number of metaphors may have to be used if the complex nature of the real world is to be presented in simplified, understandable ways.⁵¹

Spatial analysis in GIS is generally qualitative, visual, and intuitive, despite its technology being insistently pigeonholed as a tool for solely quantitative applications.⁵² In fact, a good portion of GIS attribute data is qualitative in nature—including names (such as owners of land parcels, businesses, and street addresses) and types or labels (such as roads, settlements, and soils). In most cases, this factor makes such types of attribute data unsuitable for quantitative analysis, so they are usually queried and logically manipulated by employing the SQL (structured query language) feature of GIS—a parsing tool closer to the study of philology than it is to physics. The performance of complex attribute queries in GIS requires more than just statistical or mathematical aptitude; it demands logical thinking and spatial imagination—skills the humanities can hone.⁵³

However, quantitative skills are still important to the practice of GIS; its mastery relies on both literacy and numeracy. To fully harness a humanities GIS model to our research purposes, we must create new vocabularies of space to serve them. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari proposed such a vocabulary and coined new terms and phrases, such as assemblage, deterritorialization, lines of flight, nomadology, and rhizome/rhizomatics, to describe spatial relationships and the ways we conceive people and other objects moving in space.⁵⁴ Observed in the context of the twenty-first-century digital revolution, an integrated, multidimensional GIS application compares to a standard cartographic map “as the internet [does] to a letter.”⁵⁵ Online and desktop GIS provide unprecedented rhizomatic networking potential by employing the hyper-connectivity of the web to survey, chart, and navigate new and emerging configurations of space and time. As Umberto Eco observes, “the rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite. The space of conjecture is a rhizome space.”⁵⁶ Such a space can provide a way to consider and imagine how, in a humanities GIS model, the ancient literary, artistic, and scientific branches of Western geography, in tandem with the “three key referencing systems—space, time and language—might be engineered”—as John Corrigan phrases it—“in such a way that changes in one ripple into the others.”⁵⁷

Sources

1 P. Booker and A. Thacker, Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

2 Romm, Edges of the Earth, 3–4.

3 G. Olsson, Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 32.

4 Ibid.

5 J. K. Wright, Human Nature in Geography (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1996), 11.

6 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 121.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 J. Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 80.

10 Ibid, 84–85.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 80.

14 R. J. Mayhew, Geography and Literature in Historical Context: Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century English Conceptions of Geography (Oxford: School of Geography, 1997), 7, 43.

15 J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map” Cartographica, 26, no. 2 (1989): 4.

16 Cosgrove, “Maps, Mapping, Modernity,” 37.

17 N. Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 14.

18 Ibid., 13.

19 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3, from Modernity to Modernism (towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life), trans. G. Eliot (London: Verso, 2005), 46.