Spatial Visualization of Travelers’ Place Perceptions with Open-Source GIS

In his book, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, Paul Carter asserted that spatial history employs “spatiality as a form of non-linear writing” that is integral to “the process of transforming space into place.” Although spatial history is neither new nor uncontested, the practice of spatial history has been accelerated and enriched by GIS-enabled analyses of historical sources and literature in recent years. This paper explores GIS-enabled spatial history as a heuristic for visualizing and comprehending travel literature. As linear texts, travel narratives can be challenging to comprehend spatially. Readers are drawn to travel literature, in part, by a writer’s use of striking imagery, provocative epithets, and hyperbolic anecdotes. While these literary devices are entertaining, they result in impressionistic geographical understandings in which some scenes are privileged over others in the spatial memory of the reader. Additionally, travelers’ perceptions are difficult to capture cartographically. The geography of travel is usually represented as a line on a map, perhaps with arrows indicating direction, that depict travelers’ routes. Where a traveler traveled is important, but a more robust spatial visualization and analysis of travel narratives requires more innovative cartographic visualization tools. Using case studies from nineteenth century travelers in the American South and Southwest, this paper reports on a GIS-enabled spatial history method for visualization of travelers’ place perceptions. Maps constructed through Google Earth and QGIS reveal spatial patterns in traveler commentary and the temporal dimensions of the travelers’ observations that are obscured by linear text or simple line maps. I argue that where travelers recorded their perceptions is as important – if not more so – than that they recorded these perceptions. Such maps provide valuable insight into the places experienced rather than merely the spaces traversed.