“Is It about a Bicycle?” Digital Spatial History and Its Pitfalls

In his novel “The Third Policemen”, Irish writer Flann O’Brien (a.k.a. Brian O’Nolan, 1911—1966) penned the somewhat surrealistic travails of a protagonist riddled with guilt to report a crime he committed to the police. The policemen in the village, however, are only interested in bicycle thefts. So much so that when the protagonist reported the theft of a golden watch, the police officer in charge only had to say: “Who ever heard of a man riding a watch down the road or bringing a sack of turf up to his house on the crossbar of a watch?”

This satirical take on village police incompetence is not so different to the situation encountered in what is referred to as “Historical GIS”: we have two different groups (historians and geographers, with computer scientists sometimes as stand-ins), each with their own methodological traditions, languages and agendas. GIS, as subset of geography and applied computer science, has its inherent limits which are often at odds with what historians want. Likewise, GIS-proponents are alienated by debates in historiography which advocate a less object- and data-centric approach to history.

My paper will venture into philosophy of history and philosophy of technology to discuss the intrinsic heritage of technologies – such as GIS – and its implications for historical scholarship. GIScientists, to stay in Flann O’Brien’s picture, will always tie the debate about what their technology offers to bicycles (i.e. Cartesian geometry etc.), no matter what is put before them. Historians, on the other hand, will insist on their own kind of bicycles (such as narratology). On top of discussing these issues, I want to explore methodological venues that allows historians to appropriate (if not expropriate) GIS technology without succumbing to constraints detrimental to their own established traditions.