Beyond the Cartesian Pale: Digital De-territorializations of History

In The Landscape of Time (2002), John Lewis Gaddis links the ancient practice of mapmaking with the three-part conception of time (past, present, and future) that many historians apply to their work.  Both practices manage infinitely complex subjects by imposing abstract grids over them in forms such as hours and days, or longitude and latitude on landscapes or timescapes. Observing this, he asks: “[W]hat if we were to think of history as a kind of mapping?” If the past is a landscape and history the way we represent it, and pattern recognition constitutes the primary form of human perception, Gaddis reasons, then history, from the epic to the simple narrative, seeks to discern patterns in much the same way that we would a landscape. This landscape metaphor accommodates varying degrees of complexity, not only as a reflection of scale but also for the information available at any given time about a particular landscape, geographical or historical. In addition, the historian P. J. Ethington observes “the past cannot exist in time: only in space. Histories representing the past represent the place (topoi) of human action.” Considering this, scholars have reconceived historical interpretation as “the act of reading places, or topoi.” Knowledge of the past, Ethington argues, functions cartographically, literally speaking. As a result, he claims: “the incalculable volume of historical writing on all subjects should be thought of as a map because the past can only be known by placing it, and the way of knowing places is to map them.” As a historical-cultural geographer and digital humanist working with GIS, I will consider both Gaddis and Ethington’s perspectives to discuss how geo-spatial technologies are reconfiguring historical scholarship and pedagogy.