Inventing the Map: from 19th-century Pedagogical Practice to 21st-century Geospatial Scholarship

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"Inventing the Map:" from
19th-century Pedagogical
Practice to 21st-century
Geospatial Scholarship
Nowviskie, Bethany
bethany@virginia.edu
Scholars' Lab, University of Virginia Library
In 1823, at a small school in western
Vermont, Frances Alsop Henshaw, the 14-
year-old daughter of a prosperous merchant,
produced a remarkable cartographic and textual
artifact. Henshaw’s "Book of Penmanship
Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy"
is a slim volume, later bound in marble boards,
containing – in addition to the expected,
set copy-texts of a practice-book – a series
of hand-drawn, delicately-colored maps of
our nineteen United States, each one paired
with an edited, geometrically-designed and
embellished prose passage selected from the
geography books available to a schoolgirl in
the new American republic.
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Henshaw’s maps
and texts alike are interpretive re-presentations
of this body of contemporaneous geodetic and
descriptive literature. Formally, many of the
textual passages that accompany her maps are
designed within a framework of aesthetically-
inflected cardinal coordinates, representing
(either conceptually or in their spatial contours)
the states they describe, and positioning political
and natural boundaries in cartographically
appropriate margins of the page [see Figures 1
and 2].
As a work of juvenilia, Henshaw’s "Book
of Penmanship" is no less remarkable in
its artistic and imaginative accomplishment
for being exemplary of larger trends in the
geographic education of nineteenth-century
Americans. A sampler in codex form, the book
constitutes a set of interrelated pedagogical
and personal exercises in geospatial and textual
graphesis, or subjective knowledge-production
through the creation of images and texts-as-
image. Drawing exercises of this sort were
developed by noted American educator Emma
Willard, founder of Henshaw’s Vermont school
and author of several geography textbooks.
In a period when reading and recitation of
geodetic texts were presumed the best aids to
spatial memory, Emma Willard believed that
students should learn through the personal
creation and analysis of drawings – even, or
perhaps especially, of drawings that embed
subjectivity and aesthetic choice. ("In history,"
wrote Willard, with characteristic confidence,
"I have invented the map.")
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My presentation
argues that attention to the processes and
products of Willard’s pedagogy can be as
fruitful for modern scholars, who grapple with
the integration of geospatial technologies into
the interpretive humanities, as geographers
and literary historians demonstrate them to
have been for meaning-making among an
increasingly spatially-literate populace in the
early years of the American republic (See
Brückner, 2006; Schulten, 2007).
Work and interest in the geospatial humanities
is growing – at a variety of scales, and
with a variety of institutional inflections – in
libraries, academic departments, and digital
centers around the world. Despite the richness
of this activity, scholars press up against a well-
documented series of obstacles, pragmatic and
conceptual, in their use of spatial tools, datasets,
and methods.
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In the ongoing interchange of
the digital humanities, could new methods and
self-consciously literary and ludic perspectives
permit us, with Emma Willard, to
invent the
map?
An examination of spatial decision-making
and of the interplay among text, image,
and geographical source material in the
Henshaw book may suggest relations among her
enterprise and some ambitions held by modern
humanities scholars for geospatial technology.
These relations hinge on an openness to
graphesis and iterative design as a legitimate
method in digital scholarship. I will also
argue that a fresh, steady look at cartographic
and geospatial technologies for the digital
humanities should not be taken alone in the
context of spatially-oriented disciplines (such
as anthropology, area studies, archaeology,
and environmental history) that have more
traditionally made use of these tools and
datasets and have, to greater and lesser extents,
made peace with their present limitations – a set
of assumptions that underlie and circumscribe
the analytical and expressive power of geospatial

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information systems (GIS). Instead, I want to
extend our examination of GIS technologies and
the administrative, pedagogical, and scholarly
publishing systems that support them
into
the realm of interpretive literary and textual
studies
– and imagine them at a variety of scales:
from support for a complex mapping of print-
culture production and distribution networks
through space and time; to the visualization
of subjective spatial expression in historical
and literary documents; to an examination of
the spatial and typographical features of a
single page, or class of page designs. What
potential might geographical tools and methods
have for illuminating the spatial, semantic,
and intertextual features of books as well as
landscapes? Can we imagine a next generation
of these tools in support of visual and aesthetic
methodologies for very traditional (and, in some
cases, only marginally
geos
patial) humanities
interpretation?
If our aim is to promote, among colleagues in
fields like literary studies and digital history,
a new and timely engagement with geospatial
visualization as
interpretive practice
(timely
both in terms of the burgeoning development
and use of what have been called "vernacular"
or crowd-sourced spatial datasets and interfaces
outside of the academy, and in the context of
a growing interest in a return to pragmatic,
methodological training in graduate education
within it),
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we must ask the following question:
what is required of our shared tools, methods,
and pedagogical practices to allow us to make as
meaningful a visual intervention in our current
scene as Emma Willard did in hers?
The deficiencies of existing geospatial
applications and the social and academic
systems that support and promote their
use have been adequately surveyed. Martyn
Jessop provides a thorough summary in
the pages of
LLC
, when he identifies four
factors contributing to a strange "inhibition"
of the use of geospatial information among
digital humanists, a community not generally
daunted by the need to learn new software
tools, metadata standards, and data curation
practices (Jessop, M., 2008). The "first and
most fundamental" of these inhibiting factors
"concerns the use of data visualization and
images
per se
in the discourse-based research
methodology of the humanities" (42). That most
humanities disciplines only make superficial
use of images and image-based methodologies
suggests an opportunity, if not a need, to
interrogate our habitual interpretive practices
and the ways in which graduate education
perpetuates a longstanding marginalization
of the visual – particularly infelicitous in
light of the opportunities for production and
analysis afforded by new media. Other factors
involve: the suitability of current geospatial
software packages to the treatment of issues
like subjectivity and emotion, temporality as
experienced and expressed in the documentary
record, or interpretive inflection in the
humanities; and those specific qualities of
humanities information unsuited to tools that
have been designed for synchronic analysis
of incredibly dense datasets (rather than for
sparse, temporally-inflected data) and with a
scientific eye toward filtering out – rather
than celebrating and analyzing – uncertainties
or ambiguities. Finally, Jessop treats broader
issues of scholarly communication: issues in
funding, producing, evaluating, and distributing
innovative geospatial scholarship in disciplines
whose structures evolved in response to
different conditions and expectations. With
Jessop, I will suggest that, "although we usually
think of GIS as a positivist tool its greatest
contribution to the humanities... may be not as
an analytical or information presentation tool
but as a reflexive one," allowing us not only
to engage with the "highly experiential" and
qualitative features of our datasets, but also to
reflect on how we construct our disciplines (46).
Frances Henshaw’s "Book of Penmanship" –
a sophisticated, if naïve, 1820s pen-and-ink
GIS – serves here as an example of both
an illuminative process for, and a potential
exemplar product of, a potential hermeneutic
involvement on the part of scholars with textual
surrogates and geospatial interfaces. We lack
digital tools expressly crafted to promote the
kind of ludic, iterative, graphical engagement
with book design and geographical expression
that is everywhere evident in the Henshaw
cartifact. But the components of these tools are
all around us. It is less a technical than an
institutional and intellectual problem to identify
the small pieces – and practices – that must be
loosely joined in order for humanities scholars
to move forward in the arena of geographic
and textual graphesis, or knowledge-making

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through graphical expression (Drucker, 2001;
2009).
Is there a methodological approach that
presents itself as a way to crack open
analytically – or perhaps just allow us to
r
eplicate
and
play
in digital environments
with – the easy brand of spatial and literary
intertextuality evinced in Henshaw’s schoolgirl
exercise? I will look at a several classes of
tools and digital humanities practices as a
way of getting at this question, including: the
iterative, interpretive, and structured sketching
prototyped in Temporal Modelling (Drucker,
J.D. and Nowviskie, B., 2004) and Neatline;
5
data-mining for geography in massive text
corpora through tools like MONK and TAPoR,
and what the Google Books research repositories
and efforts like HATHItrust must enable in
their APIs to contribute to this field;
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textual
and graphical collation interfaces predicated
on visualization rather than – or as much
as – on structured markup, such as Juxta
and Sappheos;
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mobile, GPS-powered tools and
toys; and powerful, analytical GIS applications
like the ESRI products, not at all designed for
textual studies, but ready nonetheless for some
dedicated gate-crashing.
Fig. 1:
Connecticut, one of 19 maps in Frances Henshaw’s
"Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female
Academy," 29 April 1823. Library of David Rumsey.
Fig. 2:
Descriptive and positional text
accompanying the Connecticut map; Frances
Henshaw, 1823. Library of David Rumsey..
References
Brückner, Martin.
(2006).
The Geographic
Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy,
and National Identity.
University of North
Carolina Press.
Drucker, Johanna
(2009).
SpecLab: Digital
Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative
Computing.
MIT Press.
Drucker, J.D. and Nowviskie, B.
(2004).
'Speculative Computing: Temporal Modelling'.
A Companion to Digital Humanities.
Susan
Schreibman and Ray Siemens (ed.). Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 431-447.
Drucker, Johanna
(2001). 'Digital
Ontologies: The Ideality of Form in/and
Code Storage—or— Can Graphesis Challenge
Mathesis?'.
Leonardo.
34:2
.
Jessop, Martyn
(2008). 'The Inhibition
of Geospatial Information in the Digital
Humanities'.
Literary and Linguistic
Computing.
23:1
.
Ramsay, Stephen
(2005). 'In Praise of
Pattern'.
TEXT Technology: the journal of

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computer text processing.
Volume 14,
Number 2
.
Schulten, Susan
(2007). 'Emma Willard and
the graphic foundations of American history'.
Journal of Historical Geography.
33
: 542-564.
Notes
1.
Accession #2501 in the Rumsey collection:
http://davidru
msey.com/
2.
Emma Willard to "Miss Foster," 5 November 1848. Reprinted
in Lord’s Life of Emma Willard. New York: 1873; page 228.
3.
See the executive summary and report of the 7th annual
Scholarly Communication Institute, Charlottesville, VA, 2009.
SCI 7 focused on "Spatial Technologies and the Humanities:"
h
ttp://uvasci.org/
and
http://uvasci.digress.it/
4.
“Vernacular” is perhaps a poor term to address commercial,
cloud-based, and “neo-geo” tools and interfaces based on
mobile technologies, GPS, virtual globes, and Web-based slippy
maps. See Scholarly Communication Institute 7 report on
“vernacular” technologies & reports from SCI 6 and 7 on
methodological training:
http://uvasci.org/
5.
Neatline is a tool for the creation of interlinked timelines and
maps as interpretive expressions of the literary or historical
content of archival collections, currently under development by
the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia with generous
funding by the NEH:
http://neatline.org/
6.
In this area of activity, see Stephen Ramsay (2005) on
"computational analysis in literary studies as a quest for
interpretations inspired by pattern," which can move the
"hermeneutical justification of the activity away from the
denotative realm of science and toward the more broadly
rhetorical and exegetical practices of the humanities."
7.
See
http://juxtasoftware.org
and
http://sapheos.
org/