This unit on GIS is probably the one about which I am most excited. It might be because, as a medievalist, I have a huge desire to visualize the Middle Ages. Until now, I have really thought about the connection between narrative time and geography in relation to medieval literature, so thinking about how I can use language from the texts and represent places—real or fictional—is really excited.
I realize these projects are in a slightly different vein, but the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon and the Mapping the Republic of Letters are two great examples of network visualization that also incorporate a mapping feature. Of course, I think it is safe to say that where there is a network there is geography, and vice versa. I believe, and as Gregory and Hardie demonstrated, mapping with GIS seems to be particularly useful when dealing with pre-modern text sources.
Perhaps it is because of the different culture value medieval maps held that they are not necessarily reliable as geographic documentation (I’m thinking here of the Hereford Mappa Mundi). Since we get our information from literary and archaeological sources, and since I am not an archaeologist, it is invaluable to be able to create visualizations of places and spaces from language. There are some really interesting projects happening on the Global Middle Ages website, which could help show how mapping is being used in current medieval scholarship (and it’s also the website I helped edit).
That being said, I work mostly in ancient languages, which makes me wonder about the viability of my work with GIS and medieval texts. Of course, I could use the translated and modernized editions of some texts in order to establish a correlation, but what if I want to use obscure texts that are not translated? I could translate them myself, yes, but there might be place names that no longer exist, or even places I don’t know how to translate because of cultural reasons.
This is one potential setback for using GIS and medieval literature together I’ve been working a lot on the North Sea, which means reading the Iceland Sagas. These “romances” are nothing if not chockfull of names and places. Thorbjorn, Thorstein, and Thorfinn voyaged from Vik to Uppsala and then to Iceland and the Orkney Islands, but only after they raided villages in Denmark because Harald Bluetooth was in Hedeby.” I could see these stories as being really prime sources for GIS mapping, but I also think it would be overwhelming with the amount of movement from place to place.
That also begs the question, “What use is it?” Well, first, it looks cool and it’s really helpful to be able to see movement as opposed to just reading about it. In that sense, these tools could be really great pedagogical resources for demonstrating movement in literature, which as I mentioned above, is particularly interesting in replicating narrative time visually. I gave a lecture on ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’ and I would have loved to have been able to show Gawain’s travels from Cornwall up to Scotland.
Outside of literature, I can see GIS being really helpful as well with battlefields, archaeological sites, etc., as we saw in the readings for last week. While that is the case, I can also see places where mapping seems like a cool thing to do just because it’s a really cool and useful tool. Not placing judgment on that—since I may somewhat guilty of it—but mapping something for the sake of mapping it is not useful. For me, I look at medieval Britain and the seas that surround it in order to examine multilingualism, embodiment, and textual transmission, so I can see where mapping could be really great tool.
Finally, where does mapping find its home? Surely conferences are a great place to show off visual material, but what about articles? Gregory and Hardie use GIS mapping in their article, but is that because they were writing about it! Perhaps the more pertinent question is, “What about my dissertation?” Of course doctoral students are incorporating digital projects into their dissertations, but can we use maps that have transformed the literary sources we are working with into visual representations? My answer would be yes, but perhaps I’m not aware enough of how strict dissertation layouts or requirements are. I’ll end by saying that while I can see some potential pitfalls of using maps and GIS in a big project like a dissertation, it’s absolutely something I’d like to look into more.
