Spatial mapping is an old but still useful and relevant tool in art history. This week, after reading about and looking through different art historical mapping projects, we had the chance to experiment with some accessible digital mapping tools ourselves, including Google Maps and JS Story Maps. With advances in technology, digital mapping is an accessible and educationally rewarding tool in the field of art history.
In Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel’s article “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” she explains that art historians’ interest in the spatial relations of art is not new—in fact, it dates back to the time of Giorgio Vasari.[1] The identification of art with particular places helped to define the cultural identity of countries while also advancing nationalist agendas.[2] In recent decades, spatial mapping has become an analytical tool facilitated by advancing digital technology. Joyeux-Prunel offers a tactical introduction on beginning, organizing, and executing digital mapping projects. Ultimately, Joyeux-Prunel explains that mapping in art history is useful for education and scholarly research.
Earlier in the semester, we read “The Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods” by Paul Jaskot, who argued that digital tools for macroanalysis would become the norm for art history research in twenty-first century.[3] In this article, he used the example of a digital mapping project of a German design firm that allowed him to extract an unusual pattern in the firm’s construction habits. He used this example to illustrate his point that macroanalysis with the aid of digital tools can highlight patterns that a human may not be able to recognize by just reading.
The Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles article from this week, “Architecture and Maps, Databases and Archives: An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany,” highlight how a mapping project may help advance scholarly research.[4] Rather than the end goal being an interactive, educational digital humanities project for the public, this project served to help Jaskot and Knowles understand the construction and building habits of the Nazis running Auschwitz for a written research paper. By mapping and tracking the construction of the buildings, Jaskot and Knowles revealed a pattern of architectural instability and dynamism rather than the stable, unchanging, presence that the Nazis wanted to communicate.
While Jaskot and Knowles’ digital mapping project was not permanently available to the public, other digital mapping projects like Columbia University’s Mapping Gothic France, Boyeux-Prunel’s Artl@s Geomap of Paris salons, and the University of Iowa’s Campus Cornerstones. My personal favorite is Columbia University’s Mapping Gothic France because of its immense scope, images, and user features. Mapping Gothic France pinpoints where a multitude of Gothic cathedrals are located throughout Europe, not limited to just France. When a use selects a single cathedral, they are offered an interactive floorplan in which arrows provide images of the church from different viewpoints. The panorama is also very detailed and helpful for both the casual browser and the interested scholar. The depth of Mapping Gothic France can be attributed to the years dedicated to this project and advanced funding through a grant.
Although more limited in scope compared to Mapping Gothic France, the University of Iowa’s Campus Cornerstones offers an interactive, archival-based account of the buildings on campus throughout university history. Combining both map and timeline features, Campus Cornerstones allows users to see where old buildings used to be located and what stands in their place now. From this project, users can understand the architectural history of the University of Iowa and how it evolved over time.
I tried my own hand at basic digital mapping in throughout this week, as well. I came into class this week with some experience in both Google Maps custom maps and JS Story Maps. In Google Maps, I had identified where monumental sculptures were located in a 1974 public sculpture exhibition, Monumenta, throughout the city of Newport in Rhode Island. I had used JS Story Maps for an Italian project during my undergraduate degree to map out a theoretical road trip across Italy. In class this week, I began playing with a few maps, like a Google Map identifying places that I visited often when I studied abroad in Rome and a JS Story Map identifying a few centers of Pennsylvania German folk art. Through this experimentation, I appreciated how the intuitiveness of these interfaces. These low-stakes tests also prepared me for a project more related to a different research project that I am working on.
I decided to make a map of twenty objects in Google Maps that Owen Jones identifies in his 1856 book The Grammar of Ornament. This map does not include all the illustrations in the book, but I attempted to choose one illustration that had the clearest location from each chapter. I excluded any illustrations from his chapter on designs from nature and instead opted to select two illustrations of column capitals from the Egypt chapter. I realized soon after I began inputting the location information in the map that some location’s names had not remained the same. For example, the “Memnonium” that Jones refers to in Egypt, is now referred to as the “Ramesseum” to refer to an ancient tomb. There were also a few items from India and Persia that Jones accessed from libraries and museums in England rather than their place of origin. He also uses racist and culturally reductive language, using the term “savage” to refer to indigenous tribes across continents. Because he used this term to name a chapter, I included it in the description for that illustration, but I made a note in the map description warning any potential viewers about the presence of this racist, antiquated language.
After reading the articles about metadata last week and my own experimentation with mapping this week, I realize that there is also a healthy amount of ambiguity that scholars must contend with. I think that approaching uncertainty with transparency about unknown or ambiguous information is the best way to present information without construing data. Mapping is still a useful and relevant tool in art history to extract patterns from large amounts of data and allow users to understand a bigger picture of the relationship of art with place and time.
[1] Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” In The Routledge Companion, ed. Kathryn Brown (Routledge, 2020), 88-108.; Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities,” 88.
[2] Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities,” 89.
[3] Paul B. Jaskot, “The Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” Visual Resources 35:1-2 (2019): 21-33.
[4] Paul B. Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles, “Architecture and Maps, Databases, and Archives; An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany,” The Iris (February 15, 2017).
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