For some masochistic reason, I’m taking another fascinating class this summer: Readings in Early America. It’s a three-week crash course on recent historiography. I’m taking it for two reasons: first and most importantly, comp exams in January. Reason two? It’s early America, I am an early Americanist, and I haven’t taken an early America course in over a year. Plus, it’s with Lewis, and he’s completely ridiculous. I appear to be sidetracking, but I do have a point!
Anyway, this class is massive amounts of reading all at once, and one of tonight’s articles is truly something I’ve never encountered before. Claudio Saunt of the University of Georgia wrote a piece in the William and Mary Quarterly, the premier early America journal, called “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography”* in which he literally mapping the “mental geography of the field” (746) from 1944, when the journal expanded from just Virginia history, through 2006. Not only did he categorize almost every single article by the author’s university and the subject matter, but he then divided them into pre-determined regions. He then created cartograms, “which display the geographic distribution of a given variable (people, automobiles, oak trees) by resizing defined units (countries, states, counties) in proportion to that variable” (750). In this case, regions with many articles written about or from them will appear larger on the map than regions with fewer articles. For example, the journal has published manymanymany more articles about the Northeast than California. Therefore, though California is geographically bigger than the Northeast, the Northeast appears larger on the map than California. It’s subjective rather than objective.
I won’t restate all his conclusions here, Saunt does that quite well himself and the article includes the cartograms he created. Actually seeing the way the field has changed over time and the patterns that emerge is really quite fascinating, though, and got me thinking. Could a project like this go digital though? In a way, Saunt’s project reminds me of projects like we looked at last week, Australia’s Mapping our Anzacs for example, where people can plot on a map where veterans of World War I came from. Instead of clusters of little markers, though, he literally changed the face of the continent using cartograms instead of the more traditional equal-area map.
I think, in the end, it’s word “traditional” that gets me. Almost everything we do with history in conjunction with the Internet and Web 2.0 is untraditional. I’d like to see a map that doesn’t use little flags, but rather one that might change size depending on what information people feed into it. In a way, as Saunt points out, it can more accurately reflect mental attitudes, a la “Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover depicting a Manhattenite’s foreshortened view
of the continent” (750) because the reader can see, in this case for example, a person’s world view or how important different variables are in relation to others.
It seems to me that getting opinions and understanding where the public is coming from is part of the job of a public historian and/or museum professional, and today, much of that is done via the web. Using this kind of insight gathering can let museums know, for example, which exhibits or parts of the museum visitors like most in a simple, visual way. It would, of course, have be supplemented with a comment sheet or in-person interview, but the results might help the staff decide where to start if more than one area is up for reconsideration.
In terms of digital collections after a tragedy, I’m thinking CHNM’s 9-11 project and Hurricane Katrina websites, these kinds of maps would show where items came from or what part of the country they refer to, giving an idea of where people’s attention is focused. Since submission date is stored as well, one could look over time and find out what part of the country submitted the most at any given time, or if there were any patterns.
Admittedly, these might not be completely original data, and I’m sure something similar has been done. I’ve not seen many cartograms though (I didn’t even realize they had a name), and looking at distorted maps is far more interesting than looking at normal maps, at least in my opinion. If nothing else, it might be a fun option to explore, if only for break in monotony and the opportunity to show people how maps aren’t static truth, but merely subjective representations of the world around us.
*The original article can be accessed through the History Coopertive, which requires a subscription. If your institution has one, log into the library, then go here and access the WMQ, October 2008. AU students, that link should ask you to log into the system and will then take you to the main page. HC is particularly awesome, as it has the latest issues of journals, not just the ones from at least two years ago.
