Riley: Week 10

I know that we discussed this at some length already in class, but I still can’t stop thinking about the article “Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who’s looking”. As I said in class, I had already known that corporations like Google weren’t objective when it came to naming places (See: Gulf of America), but I was really struck by the actual redrawing of borders based on the location from which a person is searching. It really drove home once again how inherently political things that can seem objective are, such as archives, data visualizations, and maps. It makes a lot of sense upon further reflection: If a territory is in dispute, won’t the nation with more power/money/resources try to dominate how it appears on the maps in order to reflect their desired reality?

Another way in which this week complicated the idea of mapping tools as objective was the reminder of how much space changes over time. Borders, town names, and visual representations change over time, greatly complicating the historian’s ability to use geospatial mapping tools on historical maps. In the words of Richard White in the article “What is Spatial History?”, “…space is neither simply natural geography nor an empty container filled by history. It is rather something that human beings produce over time.”

This is something that I need to keep in mind while doing research. Things like a subject’s class, and therefore access to quicker/easier transportation, or the time of year/part of the country combined with whether or not they would have been able to travel in those conditions with the technology available at the time, are all important factors to consider. This will be important to keep in mind as I do more research on a family I’m doing research on, who semi-frequently traveled between Mississippi and Ohio/New York by train in the 1860-70s. When tracing their movements between North and South, these are the sort of things I need to consider when thinking about how they would have experienced these movements.

This idea of different experieces of space and time is really interesting to me. On a personal note, my partner Maeve recently presented a paper at a conference on the topic “crip time” as it relates to romantic poetry. Essentially, the theory of “crip time” is that disabled people move through space and time differently than able-bodied people, both in terms of physical movement and amount of/perception of time (Example: Someone with a walker navigates a space more slowly than someone without one.) Therefore, a disabled perspective can produce a different view of space and time. While this doesn’t necessarily have to do with changes over time historically, it is one other way in which things like space are subjective.

In establishing that space is subjective, it becomes clear that representations of space are also subjective. When looking at historical maps, these are the sorts of things that I’ll now be thinking about more: Who produced this map? For what purpose, and for whom? Exactly when and where? Rather than thinking of them as objective representations of space as it existed, I now see maps more as representing space as it was perceived, or even as it may have been desired.