19 Mar 2008
The convergence of handheld computers and cellphones with positioning technologies like GPS make it possible to annotate any place with layers of digital information. As computing and communication devices become smaller and cheaper, the potential for ‘ubiquitous computing’ becomes more real: people begin to imagine computers as things that are embedded into the environment, rather than placed on a desktop or carried around. This week we discuss the implications for historical practice and public history, concentrating on the possibility of making each thing in the world “the protagonist of a documented process … an historical entity with an accessible, precise trajectory through space and time” (Sterling).
Readings for Discussion
Associated Press, “Historic Websites,” (4 Jul 2006).
Buckland, Michael and Lewis Lancaster. “![[WWW]](http://wikispot.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/sycamore-www.png){kind=small}
Combining Place, Time, and Topic: The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative,” D-Lib Magazine 10, no. 5 (May 2004).
Crane, Gregory. “Georeferencing in Historical Collections,” D-Lib Magazine 10, no. 5 (May 2004).
Dodson, Sean. “The Internet of Things,” The Guardian (9 Oct 2003).
Hill, Linda L. “Georeferencing in Digital Libraries,” D-Lib Magazine 10, no. 5 (May 2004).
Leung, Wency. “Life Murder and Bootleggers: Every House Tells a Story,” Toronto Globe and Mail (19 Oct 2007).
Rogers, Garett. “Google Earth in 4D,” Googling Google (12 Nov 2006).
Roush, Wade. “Social Machines,” The Continuous Blog (5 Jul 2005); also appeared in Technology Review (Aug 2005).
Roush, Wade. “From Lewis and Clark to Landsat: Digital Maps Marry Past and Present,” Technology Review (Jul 2005).
Roush, Wade. “Killer Maps,” Technology Review (Oct 2005).
Sterling, Bruce. “When Blobjects Rule the Earth,” SIGGRAPH (Aug 2004).
Sterling, Bruce. “Dumbing Down Smart Objects,” Wired 12, no. 10 (Oct 2004).
Unsworth, John M. “Vernacular Computing,” AAUP Electronic Publishing Workshop (14 Jun 2006).
Weiser, Marc and John Seely Brown. “The Coming Age of Calm Technology” (5 Oct 1996).
Technical Background Readings
Garmin Corporation. GPS Guide for Beginners (2000).
Schwartz, Robert M. “Railways and Population Change in Industrializing England: An Introduction to Historical GIS” (22 Jun 1999).
=== Individual Exercises ===.
Easy. Work with online historical GIS. The David Rumsey Map Collection consists of over 13,600 historical maps and a variety of interfaces for working with them. Spend some time exploring the collection for resources of interest in your own work. Do the GIS-based tools on the site allow you to interact with the maps in useful ways?
Easy. Explore a geocoded classic. The book catalogue at Gutenkarte consists of digitized works from Project Gutenberg that have geocoded toponyms. The Gutenkarte interface allows you to map all of the place names at once, to browse passages of the work and see corresponding maps, or vice versa. Explore the interface, using one of the historical works (like J. D. Hooker’s Himalayan Journals or Gibbon’s History). How does access to geocoded information change your reading of the text? What do you learn if you compare the maps generated for different works?
Easy. Create an online map of geocoded sources. Sign up for an account at Map Builder and geocode some places or sources of interest in your own research. (You might, for example, geocode some local histories from the Our Roots site.) How might the system be extended to make it more useful for historical research?
Easy. Exploring cartographic representations. The Places and Spaces exhibit explores the power of cartographic representation for both real and abstract spaces. Many of the images have a temporal or historical component. Study them, and then write a short essay about the ways that spatial representation can influence our perception of time. Besides historical geography, what kinds of research possibilities emerge from simultaneous consideration of time and space? Or of place and the past?
Further Reading
Erle, Schuyler, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh. Mapping Hacks. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005.
Flickr: Explore Everyone’s Geotagged Photos on a Map.
Gibson, Rich and Schuyler Erle. Google Maps Hacks. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2006.
Gregory, Ian. A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research (2002).
Knowles, Anne Kelly, ed. Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History. Redlands, CA: ESRI, 2002.
Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14, no. 3 (2006), Special Issue on Locative Media.
McCullough, Malcolm. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004.
Monmonier, Mark. Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy. Chicago: Chicago, 2004.
Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005.
Ormsby, Tim et al. Getting to Know ArcGIS Desktop, 2nd ed. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2004.
Schuurman, Nadine. GIS: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005.
