Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, many Europeans and Americans traveled to the Middle East for a number of reasons. Some came to conduct archaeological expeditions or tour religious sites, while others hoped to investigate ancient cultures or pursue geopolitical interests. These travelers documented their visits through narratives and images, and today these documents provide invaluable resources for students and scholars in a variety of disciplines, ranging from literature and women’s studies, to archaeology, religion, history, and postcolonial studies. Until now, these materials have been scattered throughout libraries and private collections around the world, and systematic research on these documents has been time-consuming and expensive. However, TIMEA, the Travelers in the Middle East Archive, provides greater access to many of these rare materials as well as sophisticated analytical tools, thereby enabling new modes of scholarship focused on these textual, visual, and geographical resources.

-from the TIMEA project web portal

Figure 1: The TIMEA project is not only about digitally reproducing and disseminating rare printed materials from earlier centuries but also about producing new, technologically-advanced maps to place these materials in their original geographic contexts.(images courtesy of the TIMEA project)

TIMEA is a digital archive of narratives documenting travel to the Middle East published between the 18th and early 20th centuries, along with images and interactive GIS maps. Initiated in 2004, this project has quickly distinguished itself as an innovative digital archive but it has done so by tackling the same dilemmas that conflict virtually every other work of historical research: how to best make the research exciting, relevant and publicly accessible. Chief among TIMEA’s strategies for addressing these issues has been an embracing of advanced mapping technology, namely geographic information systems or GIS, as both a deliberate means of organizing the research through geography and a means of making the public interface with the research more graphic and interactive. In practice, what this means is that TIMEA aims to use interactive GIS maps as a means of accessing a diverse range of other visual materials. To understand how GIS makes this possible, the first thing to know is that GIS is not simply the most recent development in the long history of cartography but also signifies a quiet revolution in the way maps are used and how map-making is actually conceived. In fact, a quick look at the the prehistory of GIS will help frame why GIS makes sense in the context of the TIMEA project and other current humanities-based research projects.

MAPS AS WE ONCE KNEW THEM

Maps, those that we familiarly imagine as hand-drawn, rolled-up, folded, marked by tattered edges and discolored from age, have been a hallmark of historical research for a very long time. They have, in essence, enabled researchers to place—or date— their findings at a particular juncture in time within a landscape that simply cannot resist the effects of time. In other words, maps allow us to stop time and in the process provide us with a clear snapshot of a specific geography that will inevitably be outdated, either already or sometime in the near future. The map shown below from 1885, or in fact any map that is dated, illustrates perhaps one of the few truly enduring conditions that cartography has had to face in its long development. This obvious reality-- that a map from one year will be quickly replaced by a map of the following year-- has lent substantial character to the specialized craft of map-making, but also signifies an enormous shortcoming of the craft. In fact, from this perspective, the idea of assembling a map collection becomes less a matter of cultural value and more a matter of cultural necessity.

Figure 2: An example of a hand-drawn historical map of the Nile delta region of Egypt from 1885, digitally reproduced courtesy of the TIMEA project. The information on the map represents the specific knowledge, culture and technology of the period in which it was made.

This laborious manner of manually making maps-- to be fair, it has been the only technique for much of history-- does seem remarkably consistent with the other aspects of a research process. A new map can be produced with each successive discovery, which in turn allows for a rich picture of how a research project has evolved. This is in fact exactly how many of the aged books in the TIMEA collection are pieced together. Presenting themselves as travelogues of academic travelers-- archeologists, anthropologists, historians of one kind or another--, each book collects a range of written and graphic material by the author to help illustrate a portrait of a place at a specific time. Exquisitely drawn maps are certainly a major part of this presentation, and they work very well in this context. Nonetheless, if we leap forward to the 21st century, research in the humanities looks very different—the TIMEA project is a case in point— as it leverages a variety of new interrelated imaging technologies including digital photography, digital video, interactive websites and, of course, geographic information systems. The exquisitely-drawn map, like photographic film and the manuscript, is soon deemed inadequate to convey the depth and complexity of the collected research and its functionality is soon reduced to being merely an artifact of an earlier era.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES, NEW MODES OF RESEARCH

New technologies give way to new ways of working, and the TIMEA project, despite its unique content, becomes one of many recent humanities-based research initiatives that aim to leverage these new modes of research. Take a quick look at a few notable examples beyond the TIMEA project:

Chaco Digital Initiative

The Valley of the Shadow

Lewis and Clark Across Missouri

Salem Witch Trials

What these projects share with TIMEA is subject matter that is best represented through diverse artifacts from a wide variety of mediums. Equally significant, each initiative seeks to use some means of digital technology — interactive websites, online databases, online photo galleries, and interactive maps— to both organize these scattered materials and allow the public to discover their own relationships between artifacts. Try to imagine how one might have presented these varied artifacts before the digital age and it quickly becomes evident that current research methods are not simply incorporating new technologies but are being radically changed by them.

In the case of TIMEA, artifacts are not limited to books and photographs, but include a range of visual ephemera from scarves to cartoons to postcards. All of these items, however, are tied to the same Middle Eastern geography, providing clues to a changing landscape. The selection of items below, for example, are all dated from different years but all relate to Egypt, and obviously serve to describe the place from a dizzying array of perspectives. When working with this kind of complex array of materials, the geography, it seems, becomes the most logical way of organizing the research. And with the contemporary mode of map-making we’ve been calling geographic information systems, we now have a way of making maps that is actually consistent with a research method that attempts to gather and connect a complex set of artifacts into a textured interface for public consumption.

Figure 3: TIMEA brings together an enormous variety of printed antiquities, but reproduces them in digital formats for public dissemination. Discovering the relationships between these objects is at the heart of the project. (all images are courtesy of the TIMEA project)

INTRODUCING GIS

To understand why geographic informations systems is such a natural extension of the TIMEA project and other like-minded humanities projects, one must first view the research of these projects less as a tightly packaged product and more as a composite of vast amounts of information that can be organized in an infinite number of ways. Similarly, GIS is a way of organizing copious amounts of geographic information. It's not a tool, a software, a hardware or even a specific image. It is, quite simply, a concept ,a way of understanding maps. If we were to use one word for describing this concept it would be layers.

Figure 4: The TIMEA project aims to create a layered body of research where diverse artifacts are combined to inform the a particular geography, above left. Similarly, at its most fundamental level, GIS is a way of conceiving of maps as layers of information. The diagram, above right, shows how a typical town map might be formed from these layers. (image courtesy of GIS: a short introduction. Nadine Schuurman. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004)

We can look at an enlarged piece of the same Nile Delta map highlighted earlier as a way of understanding the implications of layering in GIS. The image below left is the original map, and to its right is an annotated version of the same image showing how each element of the map can be understood as a specific feature of the map. Here, since this is just an example, not all elements have been thoroughly categorized but what should be clear is that the map has been subdivided into 6 essential features: rivers, topography, coastline, towns, medium-size cities and major city. Without these features, there is simply no map. Now imagine that each of these feature categories is a seperate layer and when these layers are stacked on top of each other, a geographic image begins to emerge. It seems relatively simple, but this, in a nutshell, is the genius of GIS.

Figure 5: On the left is enlarged piece of the same Nile Delta map from before, and on the right in an annotated version of the same map showing how GIS would categorize the features of the map.

The concept of layering will only seem appropriately novel in context. For centuries, maps were conceived as flat drawings where a map was literally constructed or expanded in a linear fashion through successive travels by an explorer moving horizontally across the landscape. In this process, the cartographer was never really able to see the geography from any perspective other than a personal level or groud-level. From this perspective, each element of a map was simply defined by its most immediately adjacent features; a river, for example, was seen in reference to the towns through which it flowed because this is how it was experienced by the traveler. With the advent of layering in map-making comes a radically new perspective where the map-maker is essentially viewing the geography from above, from a macro level, or analytically rather than simply experientially. Prior to the advent of GIS thinking and its related technologies there was simply no way to achieve this perspective. Now, the same river mentioned above is not only seen in reference to adjacent towns but also as part of an entire regional river system, something that would be very difficult to view from the ground. This river system would then be one layer of the eventual GIS map. To understand how this macro-level view works-- how one might actually see and graph an entire river system-- will require a cursory understanding of the technology behind GIS.

GIS TECHNOLOGY

If the layers that comprise a GIS map must rely on certain information to define features like rivers, towns, roads, railroads, lakes, etc., the next question to ask might then be, how do we capture this information? Earlier periods of cartography have shown that much of the same qualitative and quantitative information we still use to make maps— the proper names of places, their locational coordinates, and distances between places— had been logged systematically on paper through personal experiences and successive travels. With two signature innovations— geo-referenced databases and satellite photography— GIS maps continue to rely on the same cataloguing of geographic information as in earlier periods, but now achieved with far greater precision and efficiency.

Figure 6: Behind every GIS map is a series of databases like this one, above left, detailing the critical geographic information for every feature on a map. Here, the database includes a sampling of waterways around Houston, Texas. Scaled satellite photography, above middle, and a handheld GPS receiver (global positioning system) are two satellite-based innovations frequently used to measure distances and capture the locational information for places included in the GIS databases. The photography allows map-makers to study geographies from afar, while the GPS receiver is designed for finer measurements in the field.

The efficiency that this system achieves is of course interrelated with virtually every other digital innovation of our time. Places, when reduced down to a line of spreadsheet data, as seen above, become objects not unlike digital photos and digital audio files that can be reshuffled quickly and easily into a variety of contexts, whether it be an ipod or a powerpoint presentation. But here we're talking about the opportunities afforded by mapping software that allows for geographic data to be represented graphically in a wide array of styles and formats. While it is true that GIS does not specifically refer to computer software, hardware or other technologies, it does rely on an ever-expanding set of these tools to produce maps from spreadsheet information like the chart seen above. Within the software, the geographic data functions much like a genetic code for the maps. The map-maker will view the data, use the data, tweak the data but ultimately, the recipient of the map will not necessarily see this data. In the process of making a map, the data is essentially translated into a graphic format within a consistent software interface. Because the geographic data and the software interfaces are "geo-referenced", meaning they are tied to geographic coodinates, the data can be repeatedly brought into software's interface and automically seen in the same location over and over again. Needless to say, implications of making maps where the geographic content can be edited so easily are far-reaching.

Ultimately, the only obstacle to producing new maps as soon as a landscape changes is the the process of gathering the information itself. In some ways, this brings us back to seeing GIS mapping as a concept intimately related with humanities-based research projects like TIMEA. Projects like TIMEA are in fact one of the many ways in which geographic data is gathered for GIS maps, and they serve to underscore the enduring human component of the mapping process. For even if GIS relies significantly on advanced technologies like computer software, satellite imagery and GPS receivers, these devices are still only viable when interpolated by human-beings. TIMEA, like the other contemporary humanties-based projects mentioned above, foregrounds this interpolation process by making an exciting range of human-gathered research available to a diverse general public which can then make its own discoveries. In short, interactive GIS maps are becoming a central component of humanities-based research projects because they not only require human input of information to exist but then facilitate further human interaction through an interface that makes the research both more animated and highly accessible.

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Last edited by Lisa Spiro on Sep 14, 2006 2:40 pm -0500.