mapstory and the digital humanities

8/12/2019 MapStory and the Digital Humanities

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MAPSTORY: A SPATIO-TEMPORAL

FOUNDATION FOR HUMANITIES

SCHOLARSHIP

While humanists study human culture from a primarily

critical or speculative perspective, they often rely upon

historical foundations and a geographic lens that

sweeps across local, regional and global scales driven

by humanitys changing patterns of identity, culture,

and behavior. After all, every human experience, even

the most introspective and existential, has unfurled on

Earth through space/place and time - other than those few

that have happened beyond Earths atmosphere. As such,

it is imperative that humanities scholars nd new and compelling

ways to organize, share, and reect upon humanitys experiences andperspectives in space and time.

The explosion in digital humanities projects and platforms has seen no shortage of attempts

to harness digital maps to address this need. Some have managed to map cultural resources

and dynamics using online geographical applications. Some have even managed to place

these resources and dynamics over time. Still others have enabled humanities scholars to

curate collections of resources across space and time, enabling their reections to be shared

in tailored and focused ways. But, none have provided a global platform that allows scholars,

students, professionals, citizens, and youth to collaborate together in an open environment that is

continuously peer reviewed over time, therefore enabling an ever-improving picture to emerge of

everything that has happened on Earth over time.

MapStory was conceived of as a new dimension to the global data commons that lets everyone

organize and share what they know about the world both spatially and temporally, license free and

in perpetuity, so that others can benet from and improve upon their contributions.

Perhaps more important, it was conceived of as a platform that enables

everyone to compose and share their stories about topics of personal

importance to them, to local, regional and global audiences. While

MapStory enables individuals to pursue individual excellence in both

data curation and (map) storytelling, it was specically designed to

enable both the crowd-editing and improvement of spatio-temporal

data and a communal process of MapStorytelling. Storytelling,

after all, is a preternatural human process, as old as mankind, that

communities share in and continually reproduce themselves around

as stories are told, retold, rened, reimagined, reinterpreted, reied

and collectively reminisced.

... IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT

HUMANITIES SCHOLARS FIND NEW

AND COMPELLING WAYS TO

ORGANIZE, SHARE, AND REFLECT

UPON HUMANITY'S EXPERIENCES

AND PERSPECTIVES

IN SPACE AND TIME.

MAPSTORY WAS

CONCEIVED AS A NEW

DIMENSION TO THE GLOBAL DATA

COMMONS THAT LETS EVERYONE

ORGANIZE AND SHARE WHAT

THEY KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD

SPATIALLY AND

TEMPORALLY


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LOCATING HUMANITIES

DISCIPLINES IN SPACE AND TIME

MapStory has very different things to offer different humanities disciplines. For example, MapStory

will not teach ancient and modern languages, but will help us interpret and reect upon theorigin and evolution of these languages over the course of human history. MapStory will not

teach literature, but will enable us to reect upon the moments in place and time in which they

were created and on which they comment. Philosophys origins and evolution are fundamentally

grounded in specic places and eras, and philosophy as a historical conversation cannot be

properly understood outside of this context. Religion is no different. The social sciences, history,

archeology, areas studies, and the evolution of law and ethics must be grounded, as they too

often are not, in space and time, if they are to be properly understood. And the nexus of culture/

nature are on the ascendance, with natural sciences elds like ecology, geology, hydrology

and climate sciences shaping how we think about critical issues in the humanities. Even our

understanding of the performing arts would benet greatly from insight into the patterns and

processes, in space and time, that shape the structure and agency of cultural (re-)creation.

Humanities scholars increasingly recognize the payoff of conducting empirical and interdisciplinary

research, particularly when trying to develop explanations for how the world is changing over

time - locally, regionally or globally. Yet it remains difcult for knowledge produced from different

disciplinary lenses about the same places or times to literally interact and layer, allowing for a

comprehensive picture to emerge. Instead, all too often, the work goes on in its own silos. The

anthropologist advances an understanding of culture; the political scientist of state formation; the

economist of capital movement; the scientist of climate change...and so forth. These disparate

knowledge sets are then projected in the form of journal articles or conference presentations.

These silos make it exceedingly difcult for the general public and the research community to gain

a comprehensive picture of how these different insights actually overlap across geographies and

periods of time.

Fortunately, we live in a moment when the open data, academic

and technological models have sufciently matured to make

a common content-channel for interdisciplinary research

rooted in time and place possible. Nonprot projects like

Wikipedia demonstrate the viability of crowdsourcing

data from expert and lay audiences alike. Open source

mapping software like the GeoNode now provide

geospatially- and temporally-enabled frameworks for

adding and managing complex data. And the great moves

to open data being pushed by governments through, for

example, the Open Government Partnership, means there is

a rapidly growing body of geo-spatial data about social-culturaldynamics accessible for researchers to draw upon.

Humanities scholars understand more than anyone that we ultimately understand humanity

not through well ordered fact, but through storytelling. Pure empirical research, whatever

statistical modeling it employs, can never bring us to the point of fully understanding a particular

phenomenon, place or time. MapStory, in its most ambitious conceptualization, puts empirical

research to work in service of qualitative, reective storytelling, allowing us to move ever closer

towards an understanding of our rich past and complex present.

WE ULTIMATELY

UNDERSTAND HUMANITY

NOT THROUGH WELL ORDERED

FACT, BUT THROUGH

STORYTELLING


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A SPATIO-TEMPORAL VOCABULARY

FOR THE HUMANITIES

A minimally viable prototype of the mapstory.org platform went live in April 2012. About 200

individuals were then invited to begin loading data and pressure-testing the platforms ability hostdifferent le types and spatial and temporal extents. In January, 2013 mapstory.org was opened

to participation from the general public based on request and/or invitation. Over the course of the

year about 1,000 people created accounts and loaded data in MapStory. This broad community

of motivated MapStorytellers then provided a host of feedback on the limitations of the MapStory

platform, and in particular, the kinds of functionality that they need to tell the stories that they are

inspired them to tell. Needless to say, this global community of early adopters had/has powerful

notions of what the Art of MapStorytelling should be, and the technical functionality that was/is

required to reach their desired level of artistry.

As a result, a major redesign of the MapStorytelling Composer within www.mapstory.org

was undertaken in 2013, which should be deployed in Q2 of 2014. This redesign worked to

incorporate many of the insights from this community of MapStorytellers. And this Communityfeedback and resultant redesign has spawned a new vocabulary that will shape how

MapStorytellers create narratives over the next several years. For example, one requirement

was the ability for a regular (e.g., non-technical) user to StoryBoard a complex, multi-chapter

MapStory, where each chapter is guided by a StoryBox that has its own spatial extent (min/max

XY at a given resolution) and temporal envelope (start/end date, interval, and replay rate).

And, lots of thoughtful feedback over the initial implementation of annotations led to a

reimagination of multi-media StoryPins.

This new vocabulary of StoryBoards, StoryBoxes and StoryPins represents lessons learned from

2013 as they relate to MapStorytelling. 2014-2016 will see many more lessons learned, many

new concepts, and the evolution of new vocabulary that represents Community aspirations for thethe MapStory platform. And, these aspirations will necessitate the development of new technical

capabilities. Strategically, the Foundation will need to institutionalize an ongoing process by which

MapStorytellers can systematically provide feedback that spurs platform development that will in

turn empower them to share their stories.

The MapStory Foundation has had enough interaction with the academic humanities community

to recognize the acute need for their participation in the ongoing evolution of www.mapstory.

org as a digital scholarly resource that enables the organization and sharing of data, as well as

storytelling and reection. And, the Foundation eagerly invites scholars from all the academic

humanities disciplines to provide their input and feedback based on their experience with the

MapStory platform.


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STRIVING FOR COMPLETENESS

AND ACCURACY IN THE HUMANITIES

Every humanities project faces the limitations posed by time and resources. No humanities

scholar enjoys the luxuries that will allow for the ultimate completeness and accuracy of their data.The constraints of a given grant will ensure that issues of completeness and accuracy remain even

after the publishing of a humanities project.

In some cases there is no option. But, in many cases, humanities scholars should have the option

to enlist the energy and expertise of the crowd that may share an interest in a specic project.

This is only possible if MapStory evolves beyond being a place where a projects completed

dataset and story are published at the nal stage, into a place where many can participate in the

continuous improvement and renement of the data at the heart of a given humanities project.

One of the original concepts behind MapStory was the ability for distributed

versioned editing by a global community on different StoryLayers of

spatio-temporal data. Much the same way Wikipedia (and theirMediaWiki platform) enables a community to edit text, MapStory

(and our GeoNode platform) would enable a global community to

edit spatio-temporal (vector) data at a feature and attribute level,

collectively generating rich understandings (at a data level) of how

particular dimensions of our world has changed. As the required

engineering evolved, and members of the MapStory Community

took more ownership of this concept, the term crowd-editing

emerged. MapStory already enabled many other forms of crowd-

sourcing of both data, stories and peer review. This crowd-editing

capability, which will emerge in 2014 (e.g., core engineering has been

completed) will have huge implications for the MapStory Community. Most

important, MapStory will no longer just be a place where people organize, share, and reect uponspatio-temporal data and narratives. MapStory will be a place where community data collection

projects can be initiated and advanced within the platform itself.

This, of course, has strategic implications for how the Foundation must organize and align

resources and for how the Foundation must engage humanities scholars and the communities of

interested experts who are committed to advancing understanding through humanities projects.

At a minimum, the Foundation must develop a repeatable process, automate it, iteratively vet it

with humanities scholars, communicate it to the global MapStory community and beyond, and

ensure that the server infrastructure (both processing and storage) can handle the onslaught of

data that may result.

CONCLUSION

As mentioned before, MapStory is not the rst or only platform to help scholars from the

humanities think geographically, or to orient their work in space and time. But, though it has

a ways to go, MapStory is the rst and only platform purpose-built to enable their ongoing

interaction and continual debate around spatio-temporal data and stories related to complex,

MAPSTORY WILL BE A

PLACE WHERE COMMUNITY

DATA COLLECTION PROJECTS

CAN BE INITIATED AND

ADVANCED WITHIN THE

PLATFORM ITSELF.


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interdisciplinary, humanities questions. MapStory is not a technical platform that a given scholar

should deploy and manage for his or her own content. MapStory is not a commercial service

that can be used to visualize ones data, or to tell a story about ones data. MapStory is a global

data commons where ones work in the humanities can be organized and shared, in perpetuity,

for a global community to discover, learn from, and even embellish over time. MapStory is an

Open Educational Resource that any scholar or student can leverage to advance and share their

understanding of the humanities. MapStory is a platform for telling stories, in space and time, that

leverage the data from any scholar, professional or lay person who has generated data of veriable

provenance and value. MapStory is a community of people seeking to better understand how theworld has changed over time.

MapStory expands the role geography and spatial analysis

can play in humanities scholarship by empowering

scholars, practitioners and citizens who dont happen to

be GIS experts or software coders with an entry point

to project their knowledge and stories about the world

into a common spatial and temporal framework. Doing

so will dramatically expand the power of work done by

humanities scholars with deep qualitative knowledge of

issues and places, and accelerate knowledge creation by

enabling future scholars to critique and build upon the workof others.

MAPSTORY

IS A COMMUNITY OF

PEOPLE SEEKING TO BETTER

UNDERSTAND HOW THE

WORLD HAS CHANGED

OVER TIME.

mapstory and the digital humanities

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