Mdst3703 maps-and-timelines-2012-11-13

Maps and Timelines

Prof. Alvarado
MDST 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
Num of SHAPES

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."

Mdst3703 maps-and-timelines-2012-11-13

Four Ways to use Maps and Timelines in
Visualization

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.)

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

HEML – Historical Event
<heml:Chronology> Markup Language – is a
<heml:DateRange>
<heml:StartingDate> way to mark up source
<heml:DateTime> texts and then index
1995-05-21T21:03Z them so they can be
</hemlDateTime>
</heml:StartingDate> search, queried and
<heml:EndingDate> visualized
<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>

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

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

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)

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

Mdst3703 maps-and-timelines-2012-11-13

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Editor's Notes