Spatial Vagueness and Uncertainty in the Computational Humanities Karen K. Kemp1 and Ruth Mostern2 1 Associate Professor of Geographic Information Science, University of Redlands, Redlands CA, USA,
[email protected] 2
Head of Collections Development, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, University of California Berkeley, USA,
[email protected]
“Computational Humanities”, like GIScience, is another emerging discipline with its momentum arising from the growing application of information technology. In many ways, definitions of this field sound remarkably like those of GIScience: [Computational Humanities] works at the intersection of computing with the arts and humanities, focusing both on the pragmatic issues of how computing assists scholarship and teaching in the disciplines and on the theoretical problems of shift in perspective brought about by computing…. Its object of knowledge is all the source material of the arts and humanities viewed as data. Like comparative literature it takes its subject matter from other disciplines and is guided by their concerns, but it returns to them ever more challenging questions and new ways of thinking through old problems.[1] Information Technology has been embraced by some scholars in the Humanities as a significant advance in the ability to access and share inaccessible scholarly resources. A quick surf for “history” on the Web will locate a huge number of sites devoted to making available digital versions of rare cultural and historic resources previously only seen by individuals fortunate enough to visit the museum, institute, traditional library, physical archive or original location at which they can be found. Excellent examples of such websites include the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress (memory.loc.gov/ammem/ammemhome.html), the Perseus Project at Tufts University (www.perseus.tufts.edu), the Civil War Collection of the Minnesota Historical Society (www.mnhs.org/library/search/museum/ about_civilwar.html), the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library (idp.bl.uk), and the Valley of the Shadow project at the University of Virginia (jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/). The recent NSF Digital Libraries Initiative II supports several projects creating systems for digitally archiving cultural resources as diverse as music, handwritten manuscripts, cuneiform sources and Chinese texts. As the technologies for digitizing and cataloging these materials are perfected, the implementation of cultural resource archives is exploding. However, most of these projects have produced large, but self-contained archives with little analytical functionality or accessibility beyond the domain of the individual archive and its predefined use scenarios. The constraint now, it seems, is not so much the information technology, but the ability to access, integrate and make use of what is already on-line. A notable exception to the single project approach to digital resource archives for the Humanities is the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI, www.ecai.org). Created by Lewis Lancaster, Prof. Emeritus of Chinese and Buddhist Studies at the University of California Berkeley, it is now a worldwide collaborative effort to develop a globally distributed, spatio-temporally indexed digital library of cultural and historical resources. Rather than supporting the development of unique, project-specific on-line resources, ECAI seeks to build a scholarly community which shares interoperable digital archives bound together through geographically referenced data, customized metadata, connections to distributed data servers and a spatio-temporal browser, TimeMap, which is currently under development by ECAI members at the University of Sydney, Australia (www.timemap.net).
However, ECAI now has a critical need to focus on larger issues related to how Humanities scholars will actually make use of the data contained in this infrastructure. The community of scholars excited about what ECAI can potentially offer has grown substantially over the past couple of years, but it has become difficult to encourage and guide individual scholars to participate in the development of content for the archive and metadata for the library. A significant part of this reluctance comes from a lack of understanding about the power of the geographic perspective. While the geographic perspective is not traditionally a significant component of research done in the disciplines focusing on the preservation, transmission, and interpretation of the human record, geographic information is nevertheless a fundamental attribute of much of the material collected and studied in these fields. Geographic references appear in texts, are part of the documentation stored with images of historic sites and events, and are used to differentiate between historic individuals with similar names. As in many other disciplines, there is now a growing awareness that the geographic perspective adds a completely new dimension to scholarship. At a more profound level, geography pervades a great deal of scholarship in the humanities. In the recent book Wanderlust: A History of Walking [2], author Rebecca Solnit traces the means by which communities of people have created, defined and shaped places by the act of walking, the ways that walking has fostered creation of built environments conducive to more and different walking, and the ways that the act of walking has contributed to art, literature, and philosophical writing. The places that Solnit writes about, the sources she uses for her writing, and the form of her writing are typical of the ways that spatiality emerges in humanities scholarship. None of the places that she describes—including pilgrimage routes, pedestrian-friendly urban neighborhoods, and mountainsides—have a precise territorial extent. Few of the places or routes can be named, and every one of them changes over time in every possible way: names, attributes, and footprints are extremely fluid. Solnit’s sources for understanding the spaces produced by walking include novels, gardens, photographs, and participantobservation. None of these can easily be reduced to quantitative data. The GIS Team of ECAI is attempting to assist in achieving this new vision for Humanities scholarship by addressing the problem and potential of using location as one of the major keys for storing and finding resources within the distributed ECAI archive. How Humanities scholars conceptualize, record, represent and visualize location and the geographic context is yet to be fully explored. As with many environmental modeling projects implemented in GISs of the 80’s and 90’s, we are asking scholars to change their methods to suit the technology rather than making the technology work for them [3]. As issues of conceptualization, visualization and representation are important current research themes in GIScience, it is an opportune and necessary time to address these issues in the fresh context of the Humanities. Traditional Humanities scholarship is long term, solitary and reflective. It involves collating and interpreting a wide variety of sources to build a complex narrative of events and processes. The serendipitous discovery of a clue from an unexpected source is often significant. Discovering items related by geography and learning about the spatial context of events, societies or historical figures are important to constructing an interpretation. In the history of a city or an empire, the place itself is a character in the story. However, few humanities scholars have a tradition of explicitly articulating location. In the humanities, location is often simply a place name whose geographic coordinates may be poorly specified and whose name may have changed over centuries and among different linguistic communities. Historic boundary locations are often very uncertain. Over time, cartographic conventions for recording accurate geographic position have varied considerably from today’s standards. In some cases, boundaries may not ever have been explicitly determined, or if they were, that information may have been lost in the intervening centuries of cultural upheaval. Humanities scholars are just beginning to “use GIS.” Most believe that they must put a dot or a line on a digital map precisely locating places, even when the location is uncertain.
This creates a number of basic but critical problems and issues. How can geographically related digital information provided by other scholars be found automatically if everyone gives their dots different geographic coordinates? Are these different locations the same place? How can current efforts to develop interoperable digital gazetteers be enhanced to support the needs of this community? If appropriate ways to deal with the fuzziness and uncertainty of location in the humanities can be found, what spatial analysis methods can be adapted or developed to support this scholarship? In spite of, or perhaps because of, these challenges, it is our contention that the GIScience community and the computational humanities community have a great deal to offer one another. John Unsworth, Professor of English and Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, notes that computing and philosophy share the dictum that unspoken assumptions must be written out into a formal description in order to produce meaningful work [4]. For the GIS community, the knotty problems of representing temporal change, naming and defining objects with uncertain and fluid extent, and dealing with non-quantitative attributes are all basic but critical problems.
References 1. McCarty, W.: We would know how we know what we know: Responding to the computational transformation of the humanities. Proceedings of The Transformation of Science: Research between Printed Information and the Challenges of Electronic Networks. Schloss Elmau, Max Planck Gesellschaft (1999) URL: http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/essays/know/ 2. Solnit, Rebecca: Wanderlust : A History of Walking. New York, Viking (2000) 3. Kemp, K.K.: Integrating traditional spatial models of the environment with GIS. 1997 ACSM/ASPRS Annual Convention and Exposition, Auto-Carto 13, Seattle, WA, American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (1997) 4. Unsworth, John, "Knowledge Representation in Humanities Computing," Lecture I in the eHumanities NEH Lecture Series on Technology & the Humanities, Washington, DC, April 3, 2001. URL: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/KR/ (2001)
