Exercise, Pt. 1: Mental Mapping
Before we go into some of the key questions for this module, we’d like you to draw a map of your campus from memory. Please do so now, using a blank piece of paper or a drawing app on your computer or phone. We will return to this exercise at the end of the module, but it is important that you draw it before continuing.
You can draw the map in any way you’d like. There is no right or wrong way to draw a map of your campus, even if you have never physically been there! If this is the case, you can draw a map of what you imagine your campus to look like, based on your own ideas as well as anything you might have been told or shown in the past.
No map will look the same even if it’s of the same place; the point is that place can be interpreted and represented in diverse ways. Despite the authority often communicated through maps, it is important to remember that all maps are subjective.
Historical research and storytelling in the digital age
Thinking about historical research and storytelling in the digital age involves a range of considerations, including but not limited to: historical research that uses digital methods for inquiry and data collection, historical narratives told through digital media, as well as histories of digital (and spatial) media, including the historical power relations that shape questions of digital access and impact. Digital practices and media respatialize research in methodological, conceptual, and practical ways. Questions about where research takes place (in the field, the archive, at home, and/or online, for example) and how phenomena or research materials travelare all shaped by the digital turn.
Indeed, historical research today is now inseparable from digital media, from research design to data collection to knowledge mobilization. The list of tools required to conduct and produce historical-spatial narratives has expanded to include computers, portable scanners, digital data and databases, reference/record management systems, GPS and mapping software, translators, the Worldwide Web (WWW), wifi, digital instruments and recorders, e-mail, and more. Indeed, very few research materials nowadays can be considered solelyanalogue – even within historical research, which values the physical, tactile materiality of archival objects (such as papers, photos, and instruments), analog materials are now mainly accessed first through a digital search. In cases where a physical finding aid is still available, there are often several digital steps before, during, and after accessing the hardcopy. These steps to locating physical materials increasingly happen online and off-site.
Maps are rich mediators of human-spatial information that can encode some version of a particular place or spatial relationship over time, but they must be scrutinized along lines mentioned earlier (perspective, orientation, authorship, political purpose, etc.). Stuart Dunn (2017, 90) notes that “[m]aps are simply one chann