The Productive Scholar: Ben Johnston on Mapping in the Humanities

Ben John­ston

Ben John­ston, lead instruc­tional tech­nol­o­gist at Princeton’s Human­i­ties Resource Cen­ter (HRC) started his ses­sion by explain­ing that he decided to focus on map­ping in the human­i­ties using Google map­ping appli­ca­tions in this pre­sen­ta­tion for a few rea­sons. He noted that ArcGIS and many other GIS appli­ca­tions already have a strong fol­low­ing in the sci­ences, and a lot of good work is being done there. He says that we can pro­vide more schol­arly atten­tion in the human­i­ties using geolo­ca­tion. There are ben­e­fits from map­ping in the human­i­ties that one can eas­ily carry out with tools like Google Earth and Google Maps, both of which have a very low thresh­old of entry for their use. Many GIS tools are highly capa­ble and advanced, but usu­ally have a high learn­ing curve com­par­a­tive to Google Maps and Earth.

Maps were once frozen in time in paper form, sim­ple snap­shots of what existed at some spe­cific point. Now, dig­i­tal maps can show a mov­ing his­tory, and one can mashup data from two or more appli­ca­tions that all speak the same lan­guage, like HTML, JavaScript, or geolo­ca­tion data. Dig­i­tal maps pro­vide the poten­tial of a dynamic, liv­ing resource, unlike a tra­di­tional map. Mashups are a good way to begin to under­stand how geolo­ca­tion is use­ful in visu­al­iz­ing data for scholars.

Uses for maps in the human­i­ties could be clas­si­fied in four ways, accord­ing to Johnston:

• mashups
• ref­er­ence mate­ri­als or resources
• research orga­ni­za­tional tools
• col­lab­o­ra­tive note tak­ing tools

He also said that map­ping in schol­arly work can:

• help to make a lit­er­ary work come alive
• orga­nize his­tor­i­cal research by locale
• allow stu­dents to take geolo­ca­tion based notes in the field

He noted that maps can be used to plot map­ping loca­tions (way­points or place­marks) ver­sus map­ping data (color coded maps show­ing an event or idea asso­ci­ated with areas, such as a state, or a diam­e­ter around a ground zero event).

Using plu­g­ins like WP-geo, you can asso­ciate Word­Press posts with place. In Rep­re­sent­ing the Queen of Sheba, stu­dents read lit­er­ary sources on the topic, found ref­er­ences to the topic, and plot­ted them on the map.

Housingmaps.com is one exam­ple in a mil­lion of use­ful geolo­ca­tion mashups. It takes Craigslist hous­ing list­ings and maps them using Google Maps. It changes the maps dynam­i­cally accord­ing to new incom­ing data from Craigslist, and makes the map’s place­marks sortable by price, site, and so on. Though this is a more general-use exam­ple of a mashup, many aca­d­e­mic uses of mashups exist.

Princeton’s HRC has done sev­eral maps-centric projects, and John­ston shared some of them.

The Ger­man Depart­ment col­lab­o­rated with the HRC to make a student-driven research site that con­sisted of place­marked reports of vis­its by Prince­ton stu­dents in Munich to restau­rants, bars, gro­ceries, and gyms. It allowed a more authen­tic, Princeton-centric under­stand­ing of stu­dents who were new to Munich to learn from their peers’ experience.

The Prince­ton Paw­prints project was a col­lab­o­ra­tion between a vis­it­ing jour­nal­ism instruc­tor and the HRC. Stu­dents wrote sto­ries about sus­tain­abil­ity efforts and issues on cam­pus, by report­ing with loca­tions on a map. In this case, nav­i­ga­tion is pro­vided purely by the placemarks.

Map­ping the Golden Age of Venice made use of an authen­tic scanned map, draped over Google Maps, and infor­ma­tion about loca­tions was added to each place­mark on the map.

Falda’s Rome used a lith­o­graph of Rome, over­laid on Google Maps. It allowed stu­dents to explore the map with­out han­dling the valu­able, frag­ile map.

In Venice and the Mediter­ranean (Venet­ian Crete), stu­dents went to var­i­ous loca­tions in Crete, wrote up reports of loca­tions, and plot­ted them on the map. Today, stu­dents might just take geolo­cated pho­tos to cap­ture the loca­tions, as opposed to putting them in man­u­ally as they were here.

In clos­ing, John­ston then shared some projects in lit­er­a­ture using geolocation:

• Google Lit Trips includes lots of books that classes have parsed, then added place­marks from the books. For instance, James Joyce’s Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man plots place­marks from the text.
• Cap­tain Cook’s voy­age, using a lin­ear path and ani­ma­tion via the Google Earth plugin.
• Crimelit.com links Scan­di­na­vian mys­tery lit­er­a­ture with geolo­ca­tion for reference.
• Openbible.info uses Google Maps to plot every place in the bible.