Digital History, Spatial History, and the Politics of Mobility in Modern East Asia

How can new digital tools enable the production of spatial histories that are not limited to or constrained by the flat cartographic map and the reification of “absolute space” that it entails? Inspired by Doreen Massey’s proposition that space is the “simultaneity of stories-so-far” and by Edward Casey’s call to rethink mapping as a process of wayfinding rather than as a static (and statist) display of formal knowledge, Bodies and Structures: Deep-mapping Modern East Asian History uses the open-source Scalar platform to produce media-rich spatial histories that are multivocal, collaborative, and conversational, and that permit flexible engagement with absolute, relative, and relational space via a method we call “reading across places.” In this presentation, I will draw on the contents and methods of the Bodies and Structures project, including its conceptual maps and analytical visualizations, to propose a new approach to the history of mobilities in a modern East Asia broadly (re)conceived to overcome methodological nationalisms, territorial traps, and the constraints of traditional area studies thinking. Through juxtapositions of different types of movement and immobility (of people, things, and the vehicles that carried them) across diverse networks and scales, I will elucidate the evolution of new politics of mobility that shaped and were shaped by, but were not reducible to, the configuration of national and imperial territories during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century. In focusing on specific experiences of movement, I will also argue for the centrality of embodiment as a key for interpreting spatial history.