Digital Spatial Narrative and the Production of Photographic Space

Digital Spatial Narrative and the
Production of Photographic Space at the
Grand Canyon
Nicholas Bauch
Post-Doctoral Scholar
Spatial History Project
Center for the American West
Stanford University
Question for DH and Cultural Geography:
How are the digital humanities
changing the very nature of inquiry
and practice in cultural geography?
IMMANUEL KANT, 1802
Logical Classification
“I make in my head”
Physical Classification
“places in which things are
actually to be found on the
earth”
Richard Hartshorne – The Nature of Geography, 1939
Who Was Henry Peabody?
Historical claim:
Peabody helped set a visual
template for what people actually
saw when they saw the Grand
Canyon.
Photo by George Philip LeBourdais and Nicholas Bauch, 2013
Henry Peabody, 1899. “Looking Up the Canyon from Bissell Point.”
Photo Courtesy The Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
Shiva Temple
[37] Up Canyon to Shiva Temple, from Pt.
Sublime (looking east)
Shiva Temple
[38] Down Canyon to Shiva Temple, from Cape
Royal (looking west)
Two deceptively simple questions
- Where was Peabody standing?
- What are the places captured in
the photos?
One question that Enchanting the Desert helps answer:
What does the production of
space look like?
In cartography the visual aesthetic that results from artwork
categories [points, lines, polygons] communicates a
geography of modernity, universality, detachment, and
placelessness. In other words, “cartography is a visual
language more commonly used not to portray place,
but to erase it.”
- Margaret Pearce, 2008
Digital platform allows
• Proximity to organize
information
• Landscape to become
an epistemology
The Beginning …
www.nicholasbauch.com
EXTRA SLIDES
From Zuni Point, south rim, 1899, with viewshed map
Tools in the Digital Humanities
Inward-facing experimentation
(behind the scenes)
+
Public, outward-facing expression
(communicate results)
Thesis for Digital Humanities:
Experimentation and expression
are part of the very same process.