This thesis takes partial inspiration from a number of recent and ongoing scholarly investigations: Stanford’s Spatial History Project, and in particular the work of Richard White and Cameron Blevins in mapping the railroad and postal systems of the 19th century American West; Lincoln Mullen’s research around mapping American slavery and, for this project especially, religious history; “Mapping Occupation,” which charts the US Army’s presence in the American South of the Reconstruction era, by Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbitt; and Sonia Shah’s “Mapping Cholera” project. These projects share in common a twofold approach, as “Mapping Occupation” notes, of producing “spatial narrative[s]” and “exploratory map[s], in which users are free to build their own narratives out of the data.”¹ Further, each of these projects demonstrates the potential of and necessity for historians embracing digital methods to conduct research while engaging communities of users.

When surveying this field, the Stanford Spatial History Project (SHP) distinguishes itself for the variety and volume of its ongoing scholarship, methodological transparency, and reflective thinking about how spatial and digital history relate back to their parent discipline. Across 43 projects listed as currently underway, spanning such topics as “Mapping Endangered Languages” to “A Microhistory of the Great Migration,” SHP offers myriad examples of work that renders historical data about “place” into representations and constructs about geographic concepts of “space,” thus trying to reconcile deeply entrenched differences between the fields of history and geography.²

Framing SHP’s suite of projects in an essay entitled “What is Spatial History?”, former SHP director Richard White notes that 5 characteristics mark the work that this group does: projects are collaborative; chiefly concerned with visualizations of historical data; reliant upon computers; open-ended; and take space as their “conceptual focus.” White is also quick to draw what he sees as a key distinction between a product- and a process-oriented approach to doing historical research:

One of the important points that I want to make about visualizations, spatial relations, and spatial history is something that I did not fully understand until I started doing this work and which I have had a hard time communicating fully to my colleagues: visualization and spatial history are not about producing illustrations or maps to communicate things that you have discovered by other means. It is a means of doing research [emphasis in original]; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past.³

White’s message echoes calls from other digital historians to focus on advancing process and community in this line of work, such as Todd Pressner’s call for “participatory scholarship;”⁴ Edward Ayers’s speculation that digital history would allow historians to embrace complexity via “true hypertextual narrative” types;⁵ and the work of Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig to cultivate a sense of experimentation through such projects.⁶ The fact that SHP posts its ongoing work on a publicly accessible site further builds on such ideas. Projects typically establish their historical context through introductory essays and abstracts before linking to the visualizations they have created, display the names of all associated contributors and partner institutions, and provide citations to relevant primary- and secondary-source materials. By presenting their findings and documentation in this way, SHP seeks to invite a broad community of readers to participate in examining each project while also modeling rigorous and dynamic networked scholarship. By interrogating and presenting historical data in iterative ways that form new questions even while advancing arguments about this data, spatial history seeks to generate discussions about praxis within the research community while leveraging new media to widen membership of that community itself.

For the purposes of this thesis, SHP’s “Shaping the West” and “Geographies of the Post” projects are particularly relevant. Comprised of 27 different sub-projects, each with their own historical and methodological essays and visualizations, “Shaping the West” examines the expansion of the railroad system in the American West of the 19th century, investigating, plotting, and explaining everything from worker accidents to capital investments, shipping rates to railway boards of directors. Using ArcGIS maps and visualizations and with work distributed among lead researchers, lab staff, and research assistants, “the project connects data gathered from more traditional historic sources (letters, freight tables, books, newspapers, accident reports, ledgers) to its specific geographic location using historic maps and surveys georeferenced in ArcGIS.” In the end, “Shaping the West” is interested in “how historic perceptions of space in the newly settled West were influenced by more than Cartesian geography” while simultaneously asking “spatially relevant questions” about the data, people, and sites under examination.⁷ The 27 separate investigations that make up “Shaping the West” are impressive. For example, Evgenia Shnayder’s “When the Loss of a Finger is Considered a ‘Minor’ Injury: Accidents, Occupation, Severity, and Geography on Colorado Railroads, July 1884-June 1885” is a concise analysis of the “spatial distribution” of railroad accidents. Shnayder weaves together dynamic visualizations with astute observations about her methods and the historical data, ultimately concluding with the promise of spatial history: “the great irony is that if individual railroad workers did not suffer injury or death there would be little left in the historical record of their lives. By recording names and locating accidents in space, the Colorado sources allow a researcher to retain both the individual and the broader stories in perspective.”⁸ Elsewhere in “Shaping the West,” “Railroaded” serves as a new media supplement to Richard White’s book of the same name. The site allows users and readers to examine the book’s “over 2000 footnotes, links to sources, visualizations, and downloadable supporting data files...while also allowing White and his team to continue to annotate footnote discourse and develop visualizations as analyses and insights evolve.”⁹ Fluid, comprehensive, and easy to use, “Railroaded” supports the contentions of “Shaping the West” that such work can serve as “a proof of concept and a tool that can be put to immediate use in research and teaching spatial concepts in history.”¹⁰

Historian Cameron Blevins’s “Geography of the Post: U.S. Post Offices in the 19th Century American West” (GOTP) similarly examines the proliferation of a major institution in a particular time and place, while raising new questions about how space was constructed and experienced. Completed as a digital visualization connected with Blevins’s dissertation, “The Postal West: Spatial Integration and the American West: 1865-1902”¹¹, GOTP uses D3.js to build an interactive map that charts “the opening and closing of more than 14,000 post offices west of the hundredth meridian” and affords users the chance to manipulate this data according to spatial and temporal criteria.¹² Built by Blevins along with the help of fellow SHP historians and technicians, GOTP plots data collected from Richard Helbock’s United States Post Offices, Volumes 1-8 on an interactive map, enables filtering and faceting, and incorporates a “stacked bar chart” as a way for users “to visualize the network’s geography at any point in the late nineteenth century.”¹³ As a platform, GOTP is sleeker and easier to use as compared to the Spatial History Project’s visualizations. By using D3.js instead of other GIS applications, Blevins’s site is captivating, responsive, and highly interactive, all of which is crucial for appealing to various user constituencies. Generally, Blevins’s project was instructive and helpful in terms of demonstrating the amount of data and complex spatial representations (and by extension, potential for historical investigation) could be generated from a single historical source.

Likewise, historian Lincoln Mullen leverages technology to build interactive spatial-historical analyses while investigating American slavery and the religious history of the United States combines historical inquiry with technical command and representation of data. Echoing Shnayder’s emphasis on perspective and scales of context, Mullen summarizes his approach:

As I see it, one of the main problems for the historians’ method today is the problem of scale. How can we understand the past at different chronological and geographical scales? How can we move intelligibly between looking at individuals and looking at the Atlantic World, between studying a moment and studying several centuries? Maps can help, especially interactive web maps that make it possible to zoom in and out, to represent more than one subject of interest, and to set representations of the past in motion in order to show change over time.¹⁴

In “The Spread of U.S. Slavery, 1790- 1860,”¹⁵ Mullen combines US census data and geographic shapefiles, provided by the National Historical Geographic Information System, creating, to map slavery’s growth by US county. Users may hover over a particular area to see vital census statistics for that county, zoom in and out to various scales of perspective, or move back and forth along a decennial timeline and toggle among census categories to reveal different thematic maps, or chloropleths. Mullen is able to organize and present his research in a dynamic way that “make[s] it possible for users…to explore the census data in support of making historical arguments,” even though he notes that census data is far from flawless.¹⁵

Mullen is a scholar of religious history and is currently working on a number of other digital projects related to generating spatial histories and visualizations that address topics such as conversion, shifting demographics, and church statistics in American history. One project in particular that was instructive was “Mapping Boston’s Religions: Next Steps in Mapping U.S. Religious History,” notably the section on Congregationalists.¹⁷ Here, he maps over 2,212 Congregationalist houses of worship, first showing a snapshot in the year 1853 and then showing the proliferation of congregations between the 1630s and 1850s. Mullen obtained and geocoded the data for these visualizations from the Year-Book of the American Congregational Union for the Year 1854, plotting all of this information on a series of D3.js-generated maps. Like Blevins’s work, these visualizations are fluid and show change over time in both chronological and geographic terms and capture key administrative data about each church. “Next Steps” and Mullen’s general resources and project notes¹⁸ about collecting data related to religion in America were further instructive in terms of pointing me towards the right primary sources to mine for relevant information about church locations.

Professors Gregory Downs and Scott Nesbit, along with additional researchers and technicians, built “Mapping Occupation” in order to organize and depict the positions, numbers, and kinds of US Army groups that became de facto occupiers following the Civil War.¹⁹ Created using ArcGIS and ESRI’s StoryMap and hosted by the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government, the site includes an exploratory map, detailed narratives, explanation of methods, and downloadable data. As with “Railroaded,” “Mapping Occupation” serves as an extension of a book by one of its principal researchers, Gregory Downs’s After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Downs and Nesbit culled their data from troop reports, election results, and NHGIS census numbers, and then used these figures to generate what they term “Zones of Occupation” and “Zones of Access” to better account for the military and political geographies of the Reconstruction-era South.²⁰ As with the other projects under consideration here, Downs and Nesbit rely on visualizing information to make interpretive arguments: they are quick to note that these findings are in a sense subjective, based on their understanding of “the army and its willingness and ability to influence affairs in the South.”²⁰ The authors’ methodological transparency, coupled with their framing narratives and illustrative, dynamic maps, underscore their process-oriented approach, harkening back to Richard White’s contention that spatial history is first and foremost about doing research. Students, scholars, and users of all kinds might go to “Mapping Occupation” and gain insight into this period, generate a list of their own questions, and start off on their own investigations. This seems to be the point entirely of the project.

Finally, Sonia Shah’s “Mapping Cholera” project is a dynamic map and historical walkthrough unlike any of the other projects.²² Shah is an investigative journalist, and “Mapping Cholera” has been adapted from her 2015 book Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. Shah presents historical data about cholera outbreaks in London and New York in the 19th-century, as well as in Haiti between 2010 and 2014, overlaid on satellite maps and accompanied by brisk narrative segments. Some maps appear as static images while others are animated, showing the spread of disease over periods of time. Land is shown in bright green, water is in black, and flashpoints of contagion are in the brightest green, underscoring the noxiousness of a disease that turned water deadly. Shah reported “Mapping Cholera,” while the site was built by designer Dan McRary, on behalf of the Pulitzer Center.

These projects are representative of the state of geospatial history research insofar as each uses cartographic data to investigate historical phenomena and questions, weaving together dynamic visualizations with historical argumentation. Each advances an interpretation of the data through these maps, yet simultaneously creates an interactive environment where readers might use the source materials to arrive at their own conclusions. “Assembly and Association” likewise seeks to build a space for readers to interact with historical data and “do history” by analyzing what they see in each map. The intervention of this project is to combine the methods and public institutions examined by the above studies into a single study, modeling for researchers and students the benefits of considering multiple tracks simultaneously. Each of the abovementioned projects is a highly achieved, nuanced, and forceful work of historical and geospatial scholarship; “Assembly and Association” posits that consideration of these works and their methods together affords a detailed view of a region and a people in flux.

 

End Notes

1. Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbitt, 2016. “Mapping Occupation: Force, Freedom, And The Army In Reconstruction”. http://mappingoccupation.org/.

2. Peter K. Bol, 2012. “On An Infrastructure For Historical Spatial Analysis”. American Historial Association. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2012/history-and-the-digital-image/on-an-infrastructure-for-historical-spatial-analysis ; Anne Kelly Knowles and Amy Hillier. 2008. Placing History. Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press. pp. ix, x, 3.

3. Richard White, 2010. “What Is Spatial History?”. Spatial History Project. https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.

4. Todd Samuel Pressner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano. 2014. Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

5. Edward L. Ayers, 1999. “The Pasts And Futures Of Digital History”. Virginia Center For Digital History. http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html.

6. Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, 2005. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. George Mason University Center for History and New Media. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory. Introduction.

7. “Shaping The West”. 2016. Spatial History Project. https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=997.

8. Evgenia Shnayder, 2010. “When The Loss Of A Finger Is Considered A ‘Minor’ Injury”. Spatial History Project. https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=65&project_id=.

9. Richard White, et al. “Railroaded”. 2016. Railroaded: In Collaboration With The Spatial History Project. http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/railroaded/.

10. “Shaping The West”. 2016. Spatial History Project. https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=997.

11. Cameron Blevins, 2015. “The Postal West: Spatial Integration And The American West, 1865-1902”. Ph.D., Stanford University.

12. Jason Heppler, Cameron Blevins, Jocelyn Hickox, and Tara Balakrishnan. 2016. “Mapping U.S. Post Offices In The 19Th Century”. Spatial History Project. Accessed August 12. https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=435&.

13. Cameron Blevins, 2015. “Geography Of The Post”. Cameron Blevins. http://cameronblevins.org/gotp/.

14. Lincoln A. Mullen 2014. “Mapping The Spread Of American Slavery”. Blog. Lincoln Mullen. http://lincolnmullen.com/blog/the-spread-of-american-slavery/.

15. Lincoln A. Mullen “The Spread of U.S. Slavery, 1790–1860.” Blog. Interactive map, http://lincolnmullen.com/projects/slavery/, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.9825.

16. Mullen 2014. “Mapping The Spread Of American Slavery”. Blog. Lincoln Mullen. http://lincolnmullen.com/blog/the-spread-of-american-slavery/ ; Lincoln A. Mullen, 2016. “A Very Preliminary Taxonomy Of Sources Of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Religious Data”. Blog. Lincoln Mullen. http://lincolnmullen.com/blog/a-very-preliminary-taxonomy-of-sources-of-nineteenth-century-us-religious-data/#read-more.

17. Lincoln A. Mullen, 2015. “Next Steps In Mapping U.S. Religious History”. Blog. Lincoln Mullen. http://lincolnmullen.com/projects/asch-2015/.

18. Lincoln A. Mullen, Historical Statistics of Religion in America. Dataset and source code. 2013–. http://github.com/lmullen/religious-statistics.

19. Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbitt. 2016. “Mapping Occupation: Force, Freedom, And The Army In Reconstruction”. http://mappingoccupation.org/about.

20. Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbitt. 2016. “Mapping Occupation: Force, Freedom, And The Army In Reconstruction”. http://mappingoccupation.org/methods.

21. Ibid.

22. Sonia Shah and Dan McCrary. 2015. “Mapping Cholera: A Tale Of Two Cities”. Pulitzer Center. http://choleramap.pulitzercenter.org/.