H-ALBION: Historical Mapping-syllabus

Historical Mapping [from 1993 Graz conf, Assoc History & Computing]

Teaching Mapping to the Computing Historian

The issue of how much historians need to know about computerbased cartographical techniques is one which the workshop did not resolve. To stimulate discussion we present brief comments by three of the workshop participants.

Mapping and Cartography by Jan Oldervoll

This area of computing in history consists of two different parts. One part of it is what could be called presentation graphics. The other part is using maps as a research tool. The first is for the reader, the other for the writer.

Maps as presentation graphics The apparently easiest part is how to use ready-made maps to display different phenomena on a map. There are quite a few programs that can do this. Most of them have an interface to different database management systems. They are fairly easy to use, as far as getting something onto the screen is concerned. The main task will be to teach the students how not to misuse the maps. A good example is EEC referendum in Norway in 1973. On a map colouring the municipalities voting 'yes' white, voting 'no' black would give an almost entirely black map. But Norway voted 'no' with a very close margin. The map is lying. The reason for this is that the sparsely populated areas voted 'no', the urbanized areas 'yes'. There are 'no'-municipalities in the north of Norway with a few thousand inhabitants very much larger then the capital which was a strong 'yes'-area. These large 'no'-areas will dominate the map, while the capital, with 400.000 inhabitants will disappear. It is very important to teach the students how to perceive such maps, teach them the different techniques available to avoid the traps and when not to make maps at all.

They should also be taught how to make the cartographic basis or to import them from other systems. In my opinion this should not be a very large part of the curriculum.

Maps as a research tool History takes place in a four-dimensional theatre. The fourth dimension, time, is of course important. But so are the other three. Space has of course always played an important role in history. But historians have mostly operated on a fairly high level as far as space is concerned. We may know to what degree people died from plague in different cities in Italy in the mid 14th century. But if we really want to understand the mechanisms of plague we have to look at the characteristics of the individuals being hit and not hit by the plague and the relationship between them. One of the relationships would be who lived with whom, who lived closed to whom, who lived close to the line of transport of whom. These are relationships that could most effectively be recognized on a map or at least by having persons, roads, houses, institutions and so on fixed in space by their coordinates which could then be used in analysis. In other circumstances one could add the kind and quality of land to the map and, by having individuals fixed to the same map for some period of their life, one could extract extra information about the individuals that would be useful in many kind of research.

The problem one encounters when taking this into a curriculum of computing in history is the problem of well-suited software. As far as I know it is not there. The solution to this is not to drop the area until the software has been developed. Through introducing it in the curriculum one could increase the awareness of such techniques. The actual teaching could be done by improvisations in existing software. One should also use literature, both in history and subjects like geography where these kind of techniques have been used. By doing this one would teach the students different techniques for spatial analysis. But one should also teach them the different coordinate systems used for maps and how to translate from one to another. Teaching students to use maps as a research tool should probably be done in a rather practical way. The reason for this is that good ideas of how existed software could be used to make good history is much needed. A cartographical laboratory is probably a very good idea.

Some Comments

Gunner Lind
Working with maps illustrates two general problems.

The first problem is: you must understand any methodology to use it (even as a passive consumer), also in a computer environment. In the context of maps: understand how mapping choices give bias to the presentation. This general problem is prominent in historical computing because the computer can handle many techniques of analysis and presentation where such an understanding of methodology is necessary. (Statistical, graphical, etc.) The second problem is: The active user (in this case, the researcher who wants to make maps) must understand how to 'rephrase' his/her methodological understanding and practical aims in the terms of computers and programs.

How to Lie with Maps
Matthew Woollard
The question posed here is what role, if any, should "mapping" play in an historical computing curriculum? The answer is not simple, as the skills needed to produce useful maps are usually thought to be outside the traditional skills of an historian. However, the computer, with relevant software, has opened the doors to historians (and anyone else) who need to produce maps. This poses a further problem; if it is easy for historians to produce maps, what specialised skills will they need in order to do this? The answer is simply that they would need to have a good grounding in cartographical methodology in order to produce valuable, worthwhile maps for publication. Without these skills historians would be likely to create maps which lie (not on purpose of course), or are at least biased. Therefore the answer to the second question is that historians would need cartographic skills for the successful production of maps. They should, for instance, be able to know what type of map (reference, distribution, choropleth, isopleth etc.) is applicable to the data they are either analysing or attempting to represent. They should know about the basic "sins" in cartography omitting the scale, producing over-elaborated labels, leaving out vital information needed to interpret the map, etc.

If these types of skill are necessary for an historian to be able to produce useful maps then they should be integrated into a curriculum for history and computing, especially as historians who use the computer often use data that can be represented graphically by a map. This is not a plea for computer-assisted mapping to be part of the curriculum, but as historians can also use maps as a research tool, i.e. producing hundreds of maps in order to assist the research process, there may be a necessity for these complimentary skills to be part of a curriculum too.

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