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.