Media Boundaries and Conceptual Modelling

Media Boundaries and Conceptual Modelling

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

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 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, 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 10010. 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 978-1-349-56623-5 ISBN 978-1-137-54458-2 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137544582 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.E64 2015 001.30285 dc23 2015019250 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

To Aud Eide, 1932 2015. RIP

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Contents List of Figures and Tables Preface x xii Part I 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Digital humanities 3 1.2 Modelling 4 1.3 Text and map 6 1.4 The book 9 2 Texts, Maps, and the Landscape 10 2.1 Places and maps 14 2.2 Textual landscapes 24 2.3 Finding one s way 28 2.4 Geocommunication 38 2.5 Texts and maps as graphical objects 40 3 Critical Stepwise Formalisation 41 3.1 The modelling stages and fall-off 42 3.2 The experimental process 45 3.3 Starting point: the text 51 3.4 Building the primary model 56 3.4.1 Co-reference 57 3.4.2 Time and events 61 3.4.3 What is the primary model? 63 3.5 Towards the formalised model 63 3.6 Vector data 65 3.7 Maps 66 3.8 Critical stepwise formalisation as a method 70 Part II 4 Case Studies 77 4.1 Results from the setup processes 77 4.1.1 Directions 78 4.1.2 Distances 79 4.1.3 Coordinate systems 80 4.2 Experimental setup 81 vii

viii Contents 4.3 Case 1: Povel Olsen 82 4.3.1 Paragraph 42735 83 4.3.2 Paragraph 42677 88 4.3.3 The rest of the paragraphs 91 4.3.4 Seeing Povel s statement as a whole 92 4.3.5 Summing up 97 4.4 Case 2: Ole Nilsen 97 4.4.1 Descriptiveness and connectivity 98 4.4.2 Only one 100 4.4.3 Unknown border 101 4.4.4 Summing up 102 4.5 Cases 3 4: Peter Schnitler 102 4.5.1 Case 3: Aggregation 103 4.5.2 Case 4: Route description 108 4.6 Results 110 4.6.1 What the text has to offer 112 4.6.2 What a map needs in order to be filled 113 5 Towards a Typology of Media Differences 114 5.1 Classification of results 114 5.1.1 Fully specified textual descriptions 115 5.1.2 Underspecification 120 5.1.3 Disjunction 125 5.1.4 Negation 126 5.1.5 Impossible figures 127 5.1.6 Maps can still be made 129 5.2 The question of context 129 Part III 6 Texts and Maps as Media Expressions 139 6.1 Comparing the arts 140 6.2 Media modalities 150 6.2.1 Material modality 151 6.2.2 Sensorial modality 152 6.2.3 Spatiotemporal modality 153 6.2.4 Semiotic modality 157 6.2.5 The model as a whole 158 6.3 Texts and maps 160 7 GIS and Digital Mapping 175 7.1 The mapping problem 176 7.2 Geographical ontologies 180

Contents ix 7.3 Time in maps 181 7.4 Fuzzy maps 186 7.5 Deep mapping 191 7.6 Cultural capital 193 8 Critical Stepwise Formalisation Reloaded 195 8.1 Modelling and intermediality 195 8.2 Text encoding, mapping, and borders 198 8.3 The role of the programmer 204 8.4 Formalising other expressions 205 8.5 On formalisation 208 8.6 The text 209 Bibliography 211 Index 222

List of Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 Fragment of Schnitler s map from 1744 8 3.1 Example of stepwise formalisation 43 3.2 Example of a CIDOC-CRM model based on the assertions in Table 3.1 48 3.3 Screenshot from the modelling tool 54 3.4 Fragment of the added nodes window of GeoModelText showing an example of computer-assisted manual stepwise formalisation 64 3.5 Vector data example with point A = (50, 10) and rectangle B = (( 15, 8), (35, 8), (35, 12), ( 15, 12)) 69 4.1 Screenshot from the modelling tool showing paragraph 42735 83 4.2 The statements in the primary model of the text of paragraph 42735 84 4.3 The relationships between the statements from Figure 4.2 expressed graphically 85 4.4 Map based on the model of the text of paragraph 42735 87 4.5 Primary model of the text of paragraph 42677 89 4.6 Map based on the model of the text in paragraph 42677, version 1 90 4.7 Map based on the model of the text in paragraph 42677, version 2 91 4.8 A small part of the model of the text from Schnitler s aggregation focusing on Amberfield and Baanes field 107 4.9 A topological map based on the model of the route description above 111 5.1 Map examples showing differences between symbology and map image 117 x

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 118 5.3 Spatial relationship between points as it is expressed on a map 123 5.4 Spatial relationship between a line and a polygon as it is expressed on a map 124 5.5 The situation from sentences 5.1 expressed as a figure 127 7.1 Underspecification 1: From point A, the connected point B can be anywhere in the sector 178 7.2 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 179 7.3 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 48 4.1 Statistics for place form for Povel Olsen 94 4.2 Statistics for relationship between places for Povel Olsen 95 4.3 Statistics for relationship between places for Ole Nilsen 99 4.4 Statistics for place form for Ole Nilsen 99 6.1 Elleström s modalities 159

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

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.