Visualizing Geography: Maps, Place, and Pedagogy

One of the more powerful poetic images of maps is Anna Laetitia’ Barbauld’s image of a British woman looking at a map. In “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (1812), the woman:

. . . the spread map with anxious eye explores,
Its dotted boundaries and penciled shores,
Asks where the spot that wrecked her bliss is found,
And learns its name but to detest the sound.
(ll. 33-8)

(From Project Gutenberg, provenance unknown)

This woman is “exploring” in cartography, to understand how war and imperialism have destroyed her family and possibly imperilled her life.

Barbauld’s map-reading scene anticipates the Victorian geographer Lady Jane Franklin’s search for her husband Sir John Franklin and his Arctic expedition of 130, which disappeared in 1845 and has never been located. Lady Franklin did not just passively read cartography, she influenced it, by commissioning fruitless rescue missions and somewhat more productive recovery expeditions that mapped much of Upper Canada. (She also lobbied successfully for her husband’s erroneous immortalization as the discoverer of the Northwest Passage.)

Many more Victorian readers saw literary worlds cartographically. One of the nineteenth century’s unsung bestsellers, James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls--the origin of the Sweeney Todd legend--is almost incomprehensible without a map of London’s Temple Bar area. As it was disseminated far beyond London, with a New York edition published before the end of the century, most readers probably knew Rymer’s London only from maps, illustrations, and other stories.

In the 1880s, Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland  introduced a world adequately represented by a map. Flatland exists in only two dimensions. As a satirical dystopia that mirrors Abbott’s England, Flatland might be considered a 1:1 scale map of England. Flatland is viewed from above and below by its psychopomp, the imperialist Sphere, so it looks like a map. In contrast, the pompous Sphere is a globe, so in Abbott’s parable, the world looks in the mirror of the map and fails to recognize itself. Perhaps in this forum, we shall do better.

I also struggle with envisioning "street view" and "map view" at the same time, and can only get close to reconciling them with the help of layering or other graphics like a "you are here" outtake on the same page. But this issue hits another vital aspect to mapping literary geography: what do we do with the temporal elements of our visual renderings? How do we reconcile, or at least articulate, the distance between us and the literature we're mapping? The real and the imagined space? The present and the past?

All of these issues come up in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a group of 8 annalistic texts whose first version began in the 9th c and whose last ended in the 12th. The annals contain prose, poetry, short stories, and genealogies. And although each entry begins with a date, most of them also contain reference to place.

When looking at the 10th century entries that are unique to each version (places only mentioned by A Chronicle, B Chronicle, etc), we see clearly particular spatial preferences :

It seems unlikely that the scribes had much (if any) access to maps, but texts like the Old English Orosius complicate our understanding of Anglo-Saxon sense of space. The translator of Orosius's geography/history text added "interviews" from two contemporary sailors, Ohthere and Wulfstan, who seem to dictate (with occasional anomaly) their voyages in the White Sea and Baltic. 

Ohthere's Voyage mapped by Finn Bjorklid (wikipedia comons)

But how many of the scribes over the Chronicle's 3+ centuries of creation had ever seen a map, especially of England? How did they conceive of their own kingdoms? How are changes of power among Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria, and with ever-increasing waves of Viking invasion entered into these temporal registers? 

Most important to this forum, I think, is, "what happens when we visualize spaces that were imagined differently by their authors?"  This question leads us back to the issue of street view v map view-- both mark place and change in different ways, and both are perhaps misleadingly real. Do we have any business at all using modern maps to imagine the ancient past, or satellite maps to create imagined spaces? What are the plusses and pitfalls?

Sorry to be late to the discussion! But so far, it's fascinating.

I'm intrigued by two of the points, which seem to intersect:

1) The question of trying to visualize two different views of the same space at the same time and the narrative equivalent of that, and

2) How should we use old and new maps? Should we try to see what the author may have seen? Is there a morality of mapping?

I agree with Cameron that there are different capacities for viewers. Brains are wired uniquely, and some people prefer street view (3D) and some prefer flat (2D), and some people seem to pass easily from one to the other. But the positioning is so very different-- one with a bird's eye (narrative equivalent of omniscient) and the other with a first person view. [I wonder what a game would be like with a 2nd person view? That would seem the closest to merging the two.] This would make a fantastic model for a text that switches between points of view. I can imagine playing through the text (I'm currently a little obsessed with gaming models for the humanities) with a change in point of view, as Annette suggests. What would that bring to the reader? Would the reader "see" or experience the text more as the author did? Which brings me to the second point.

What does it bring us to see things as they may have been seen 50 or 1000 years ago by an author? Like Rebecca, I work with medieval maps that don't geo-reference precisely to modern maps. We tried an exercise to geo-rectify a medieval map, and while it was possible, the result was rather amusing; I'm not sure it was helpful to anyone, though it did show the impossibility of such a task. Here I quote from one of the students in the course, Katie Gandy:

While reading over the excerpts from [Martin] Foys’s book [Virtually Anglo-Saxon, Florida 2010], especially Ch 4, I kept thinking of our attempts to map the medieval map onto a modern map while using ArcGIS.

I know that we all spent much time connecting green x to blue x in order to align the edges of the maps (April takes the cake with her 100+ alignments).  Regardless of the time spent, though, we could never make the maps fit exactly — “To modern eyes, these medieval worlds never seem quite right” (Foys 111).

We were trying to use a modern political map and precise GPS points from google maps to locate positions on a medieval map… which was NOT the purpose of that map.  Foys writes, “As maps become more and more accurate in their schematized signification, then, they become further and further divorced from ‘real’ perception of the space they reproduce” (117); we should read medieval maps therefore NOT as “an accurate indicator of physical space” (120) but as “datascapes” (120).

In adapting the medieval map to modern standards, as we did in our use of ArcGIS, we really just emphasized the ‘accuracy’ flaws without profiting from the rich information that’s within.

Indeed, when one looks at a medieval map it looks a lot more like the sort of map Rebecca and Zoe imagine for religious travelers-- Jerusalem at the center of the world, out of proportion objects and images of peoples who intrigued more than one medieval mapmaker. Here's a close-up of Ireland, England, part of France on the Catalan Atlas of 1375:

Geo-political and religious references are marked on the map-- flags and churches for Nantes and Paris, flags representing factions and alliances in Ireland and England, and then a fairly long section of text, upside-down on the left which reports travel writing accounts of what can be found in various areas of the map. This is pretty close to seeing from a bird's eye (the map) and street (first-person text) in the same space, though your eyes must dart between the two because those really are two positions that cannot inhabit the exact same space at the same moment.

As for the morality of using modern maps for older texts, or even old maps to read old texts, I think it's the combination of these points of view, as long as we acknowledge our own position and the impossibility of inhabiting anything other than our own time and place, that gives us the most possibility for insight. With every map being political and every mapmaker and author having to work with his or her own impressions and preconceptions, I don't think we could ever see what any author or mapmaker really saw, but it adds something for us to know that Nantes was almost as important as Paris in this mapmaker's eyes (why, we must ask?) and that Ireland and England are roughly the same size. But we know that is worthy of remarking because on a modern map, Paris is much more central (geographically) to France and Ireland is far smaller than the UK.