Maps and Timelines

Prof. AlvaradoMDST 3703/7703

13 November 2012

Business

• Quizzes by Thursday• Project work continues on Thursday– Come prepared with ideas for your specific

projects– Collaboration will be OK– We will learn to use SHIVA for maps and timelines

Review

• Culturomics as exemplar of the new epistemology

• Visualization as a genre of scholarship

Culturomics

• An example of the “new epistemology”– Positivist– Correlation is enough– “The physics of clicks” (or words)

• Transforms both questions and methods– What do these data represent?– More collaborative and quantitative

• Employs visualization

Why does BLUE make a move from being with YELLOW to being with GREEN?

Visualization

• A kind of scholarly product– Not just a supplement to writing, but in some

cases a final product in its own right• Distinctive of the new epistemology• Occupies the space between data and

narrative• As much about rhetoric and aesthetics as

about logic and math

ImagePlot of Vertov’s film, The Eleventh Hour

BRIGHTNESS

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Today we look at some of the basic forms of visualization and discuss them in terms of

form and function

Formal properties include the techniques used to convey ideas, such as the visual metaphors

Functions include the purposes and effects of a visualization – what does a visualization do

for scholarship? How does it relate to the discovery of facts or the making of an

argument?

Can you name a visual metaphor or device that has been used in the visualizations we

have looked at?

Invented by the philosopher and mathematician Renee Descartes (1596-1650)

What other devices might we use in our visualizations?

The devices we use to represent time and space – maps and timelines – can be used to visualize data, information, and

ideas

"We have spent most of this semester trying to run away and liberate ourselves from time and space, but it is important to find a space for a new digital understanding of these factors."

I. By plotting precise spatial and/or temporal coordinates onto maps and timelines

e.g. voting map, ngrams

II. By drawing artistic overlays over maps and timelines

e.g. Minard’s map of Napoleon in Russias

III. By appropriating the map and the timeline as metaphors of more abstract dimensions

e.g. Subway maps, narrative maps

IV. By combinations of these (e.g. with layers, etc.)

Four Ways to use Maps and Timelines in Visualization

What are some functions, or effects, of these visualizations?

These visualizations tell stories

Or, they start conversations, which is just as good

These visualizations operate at the border between narrative and data

Notice how we move from a map, to a story based on a map, to a map of a story …

Joanna Guldi @joguldi

Dr. Jo Guldi is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. Before that, she was an historian at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History at the University of Chicago, as well as a fellow of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. Her book, Roads to Power (Harvard 2011), describes how Britain invented infrastructure and strangers stopped speaking on the public street. Jo is currently working on a history of capitalism and its relationship to land use that will focus upon the international land reform movement of the nineteenth century.

“My first papers started at the hamster level — the cool patterns I could find using keyword searches in Google Books.” Guldi found, for example, that 90 percent of English words denoting locomotion — creep, crawl, stride, scurry, waddle, meander, dash, and so forth — appear with noticeably greater frequency within 30 years of urbanization and the British road network. To an historian, this points to an important but subtle change in how the general public observed each other and interacted. English, it turns out, is easily OCR’ed.

Guldi shows us that stories, which are inherently temporal, can be spatial as well

18th and 19th century Britain and France produce numerous examples of “spatial literature”

Landscape catalogs, tour guides, “object stories”

London Redivivum, an example of a book about space

What do landscape catalogs remind you of?

What do object narrativesremind you of?

Database literature?Vertov’s Man with a Camera?

There is a close connection between space, geography, and place on the one hand and database on the other

The need to control people and land, which coincides with the rise of the modern nation state, produces both statistics and spatial literature

The result of this process is Big Data from the past.

What can we do with it?

Texts also represent time … How can we extract it?

One approach is to mine these texts for historical information.

Bruce Robertson, Professor of Classics at Mount Allison University in Canada, has developed a markup approach to extracting and indexing data from documents.

@heml

It’s an approach similar to what we are doing with our Character Index.

<heml:Chronology> <heml:DateRange> <heml:StartingDate> <heml:DateTime>

1995-05-21T21:03Z</hemlDateTime>

</heml:StartingDate> <heml:EndingDate> <heml:BoundedDate> <heml:TerminusPostQuem> <heml:Date>2005-03-21</heml:Date> </heml:TerminusPostQuem> <heml:TerminusAnteQuem> <heml:Date>2005-03-21</heml:Date> </heml:TerminusAnteQuem> </heml:BoundedDate> </heml:EndingDate> </heml:DateRange> </heml:Chronology>

HEML – Historical Event Markup Language – is a way to mark up source texts and then index them so they can be search, queried and visualized

Is this an accurate general representation of an historical “event”?

Statement : <#Arrival_of_the_Greeks> <hemlRDF:simpleDate> -1600

Reified Statement A: <#Drewes> <hemlRDF:asserts> (<#Arrival_of_the_Greeks> <hemlRDF:simpleDate> -1600)

Reified Statement B:<#Renfrew> <hemlRDF:asserts> (<#Arrival_of_the_Greeks> <hemlRDF:simpleDate -6000)

HEML has been extended to use RDF, a language that allows you to use markup to define relationships between things

In RDF – the foundation of what is called the “semantic web” – anything can have a URL, including people, places, ideas, etc.

Textual passages can then be linked to their semantic contexts.

Tools You Can Use

• Google Maps• Google Earth and KML• SIMILE Timeline• Dippity• TimeGlider