Abstract Machine. Charles B. Travis
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.
GIS and the digital humanities
Scholars in the humanities have explored the relationship between geography and literature from cartographical and theoretical perspectives. Key examples range from Franco Morretti’s (1998, 2005) schematic and Marxist geometrical approaches to literary studies to Barbara Piatti’s ongoing project to map the fictional and actual locations of literary works.12 Bertrand Westphal’s “geocritical” approach explores the overlapping territories of physical geography, cognitive mapping, and literature by plotting the geometric and philosophical coordinates of real and fictional space through the conceptual lenses of spatiotemporality, transgressivity, and referentiality.13 At the same time, a number of edited volumes have helped to further engage GIS in the humanities in both practical and theoretical ways and deepen the perceived connections between cartography, theory, and literature.14
Building on these works, I have created humanities GIS models that combine and perform ergodic and deformative readings of Irish literary, cultural, and historical texts. Staley notes that in a typical written narrative, elements of a story operate in a linear pattern, with a beginning, middle, and an end. A spatial narrative can have a linear pattern (as in tour-style maps), but other forms of meaningful patterns can unfold in two or more dimensions. By departing from classic Aristotelian linear narrative, ergodic approaches in GIS—those that require work from an author-reader—can model complex spatial relationships between the author’s construction of a text, the tabulation of archival data, and a viewer’s choices.15 This type of storytelling in GIS provides an interactive platform from which to synchronize layers of images, words, numbers, and vectors into simultaneous and multidimensional narratives.16
In contrast to ergodicity, deformance is a literary-criticism technique developed in the digital humanities as a key methodology for textual analysis and data mining.17 The approach combines two words,performance and deform, to construct an interpretative concept premised on deliberately misreading a text—for example, reading a poem backward line by line.18 In Reading Machines (2011), Stephen Ramsay notes that computers enable scholars to practice deformance quite easily—to take apart an epic poem, for example, by focusing only on its nouns or by calculating the frequency of collocations between character names in a novel.19 Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of this book specifically test GIS-framed, deformative mapping models of the texts and biographies of three authors. Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels contend that this interpretative technique applies scientia to poiesis to elucidate the relationship between two discourse forms. Furthermore, they argue, this method seeks to explain a unitary and unique phenomenon, rather than establish a set of general rules or laws.20
In addition to the application of ergodic and deformative techniques, this book situates humanities GIS in the fields of multimedia art, design, and culture. Here, according to Andrew Mactavish and Geoffrey Rockwell, humanities computing falls in league with the visual and performing arts by legitimizing technological practice and the creation of non-textual scholarly artifacts.21 The use of GIS in this context illustrates Alan Liu’s point: beyond acting in an instrumental role, the digital humanities broaden the very idea of instrumentalism, technological and otherwise.22 Lev Manovich predicts that the systematic use of large-scale computational analysis and interactive visualization of cultural patterns (made possible with GIS) will grow into a major trend in cultural criticism and the culture industries in the coming decades. Manovich asks: “What will happen when humanists start using interactive visualizations as a standard tool in their work, the way many scientists do already?”23
Contents
This book presents a series of case studies related to the creation of humanities GIS models that blend tropes from literary, cultural, and historical studies. Reconceptualizing GIS by offering these types of ontological translations will hopefully foster epistemological marriages between qualitative and quantitative (or mixed-method) approaches; provide a means to visualize literary interactions with place and space, as well as critical theory; and creatively engage technological applications relevant to the digital humanities. The models used essentially implement selected GIS applications from my PhD dissertation on the “lifeworlds,” or literary geographies, of 1930s Ireland and a GIS database-mapping project on seventeenth-century Irish land transfers as a postdoctoral fellow in the digital humanities.24 Using GIS in this new way, I discovered that I enjoyed the process of mapping and gained insight