Media Boundaries and Conceptual Modelling

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1 Media Boundaries and Conceptual Modelling

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3 Media Boundaries and Conceptual Modelling Between Texts and Maps Øyvind Eide University of Passau, Germany

4 Øyvind Eide 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eide, Øyvind. Media boundaries and conceptual modelling : between texts and maps / Øyvind Eide, University of Passau, Germany. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. 1. Humanities Data processing. 2. Humanities Methodology. 3. Geographic information systems. 4. Digital media. I. Title. AZ105.E dc Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

5 To Aud Eide, RIP

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7 Contents List of Figures and Tables Preface x xii Part I 1 Introduction Digital humanities Modelling Text and map The book 9 2 Texts, Maps, and the Landscape Places and maps Textual landscapes Finding one s way Geocommunication Texts and maps as graphical objects 40 3 Critical Stepwise Formalisation The modelling stages and fall-off The experimental process Starting point: the text Building the primary model Co-reference Time and events What is the primary model? Towards the formalised model Vector data Maps Critical stepwise formalisation as a method 70 Part II 4 Case Studies Results from the setup processes Directions Distances Coordinate systems Experimental setup 81 vii

8 viii Contents 4.3 Case 1: Povel Olsen Paragraph Paragraph The rest of the paragraphs Seeing Povel s statement as a whole Summing up Case 2: Ole Nilsen Descriptiveness and connectivity Only one Unknown border Summing up Cases 3 4: Peter Schnitler Case 3: Aggregation Case 4: Route description Results What the text has to offer What a map needs in order to be filled Towards a Typology of Media Differences Classification of results Fully specified textual descriptions Underspecification Disjunction Negation Impossible figures Maps can still be made The question of context 129 Part III 6 Texts and Maps as Media Expressions Comparing the arts Media modalities Material modality Sensorial modality Spatiotemporal modality Semiotic modality The model as a whole Texts and maps GIS and Digital Mapping The mapping problem Geographical ontologies 180

9 Contents ix 7.3 Time in maps Fuzzy maps Deep mapping Cultural capital Critical Stepwise Formalisation Reloaded Modelling and intermediality Text encoding, mapping, and borders The role of the programmer Formalising other expressions On formalisation The text 209 Bibliography 211 Index 222

10 List of Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 Fragment of Schnitler s map from Example of stepwise formalisation Example of a CIDOC-CRM model based on the assertions in Table Screenshot from the modelling tool Fragment of the added nodes window of GeoModelText showing an example of computer-assisted manual stepwise formalisation Vector data example with point A = (50, 10) and rectangle B = (( 15, 8), (35, 8), (35, 12), ( 15, 12)) Screenshot from the modelling tool showing paragraph The statements in the primary model of the text of paragraph The relationships between the statements from Figure 4.2 expressed graphically Map based on the model of the text of paragraph Primary model of the text of paragraph Map based on the model of the text in paragraph 42677, version Map based on the model of the text in paragraph 42677, version A small part of the model of the text from Schnitler s aggregation focusing on Amberfield and Baanes field A topological map based on the model of the route description above Map examples showing differences between symbology and map image 117 x

11 List of Figures and Tables xi 5.2 An example of how the border between Norway and Sweden is written into the landscape of today Spatial relationship between points as it is expressed on a map Spatial relationship between a line and a polygon as it is expressed on a map The situation from sentences 5.1 expressed as a figure Underspecification 1: From point A, the connected point B can be anywhere in the sector Underspecification 2: From point B, the next point C can be anywhere in the area made up by the set of sectors created from B 1, B 2,,B n A reproduction of Charles Minard s 1869 chart showing the number of men in Napoleon s 1812 Russian campaign army, their movements, as well as the temperature they encountered on the return path 182 Tables 3.1 List of assertions based on statements in the example text Statistics for place form for Povel Olsen Statistics for relationship between places for Povel Olsen Statistics for relationship between places for Ole Nilsen Statistics for place form for Ole Nilsen Elleström s modalities 159

12 Preface The humanities are going through a period of deep change. This is partly due to developments in society at large, but it also springs out of changes in our ways of thinking and working. The linguistic turn has been succeeded by a spatial turn (Bodenhamer et al., 2010; Gregory & Hardie, 2011; Tally, 2013), and the digital is changing the foundations for research as well as for teaching. As humanists we should face these challenges by adapting to the new, to the digital and to the spatial, while keeping focused on traditional scholarly questions of great importance and consequence. This book forms part of the humanities tradition by facing one of the fundamental problems since antiquity, namely, that of representation. How do different media represent reality, fiction, myth, and other parts of the human lived world? It intersects also with the digital by addressing this problem with the help of a digital humanities method: computer-assisted conceptual modelling. And it acknowledges the spatial turn by investigating the boundary between what have traditionally been the two main media for representation of geospatial information: texts and maps. The topic and method will be exemplified by a study of eighteenth-century border protocols from the multi-cultural area of Northern Scandinavia. The book aims at making a contribution to the further development of digital humanities as a discipline. It will build a bridge between digital humanities and intermedia studies. This bridge will carry theoretical considerations as well as practical results. The book will strengthen the theoretical foundation for research and teaching in spatial digital humanities. Specifically it will develop further critical discussion of the practice of digital mapping, offering a theoretically based understanding of such practices from a humanities perspective. More generally it will contribute to the theoretical discussion of modelling in digital humanities. The book introduces a new area of research, namely, transformative digital intermedia studies, located at the cross-section between digital humanities and intermedia studies. This will be done by introducing critical stepwise formalisation as a method especially suited for studying media differences. The aim is to use the computer to get beyond human meaning-seeking interpretations of media expressions. The xii

13 Preface xiii book establishes a method for studying media differences, using texts and maps as a worked-through case study. It is meant as a starting point rather than an endpoint. My hope is that it will be used to understand how modelling is related to media differences, how texts and maps are related in complex ways, and how they can best work together. The book is a result of a long research process, starting in 2005 with a chat with my PhD supervisor-to-be, Willard McCarty. The story up until the finalisation of the PhD thesis is described in Eide (2012a) and will not be repeated here. This book is based on the PhD, but it is reworked in a number of ways. Bits and pieces of the argument have also been published in articles and book chapters. References are given in due course to these other publications. I will refer to the long list of helpers published in Eide (2012a) for all the people who were important in the PhD research and in the writing of the thesis. Here I will mention the ones who contributed specifically to this book. Needless to say they have no responsibility for the omissions and problems still remaining in this text. Dear Arianna Ciula, Jonas Bakkeli Eide, Lars Elleström, Willard McCarty, Tim Ingold, John Unsworth, and anonymous reviewers: thank you for your help in the final steps towards this book. The results presented in this book have been discussed at a number of conferences, seminars, and workshops. I am grateful to all participants who have asked questions, raised concerns, and criticised my presentations. Dear Heidi, Oda, and Jonas: thank you for being with me in this process. We may fall, but we never stop climbing.