Portfolio Activity 6: Geospatial work

Geospatial visualization is an interesting way for digital historians to conduct inquiries beyond writing or creating visuals like maps. I think a lot of the ability for geospatial visualization to be so compelling lies in its relationship of absolute and representational space and narration. A good example of this can be found within Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore. The maps taken at face value may just seem to be illustrations, but they are actually visualizations of the messy, complex topography and life of Baltimore in the early 1800’s. The project specifically visualizes the life of African Americans during this time. To hone in on a specific map, the dot density map of early Baltimore reveals the absolute and representation space of the population of Baltimore. The map dots that are purple are white people, green for free blacks, and blue for enslaved workers. The map illustrates that, considering representational space, Baltimore has whites, free blacks, and enslaved workers all living in close proximity to each other. Considering absolute space, Baltimore is extremely dense with everybody working in close proximity and with not much physical segregation in the way of communities. However, the map does not show that racism and the slave trade was still a ever looming problem, and its effects were felt by free blacks as well. The trading of slaves was everywhere throughout Baltimore, so acknowledgement of it every day could not be avoided. This is a potential problem with maps, as they do not visualize life for people, they just merely give insights of the physical space. All the color and scale of the map do not illustrate the entire story. Maps often just are not expansive enough. However, Slave Streets, Free Streets visualizes Baltimore with maps and other illustrations by exploring how everything connects and pulling information from records to stitch things together. The result of this is a visualization of how life was for free African Americans and enslaved workers. The project combines narrative details of African Americans in Baltimore with the geospatial data of Baltimore to convey how life was for African Americans. This illustration makes it easier to understand the past and help tune our historical inquiries and questions. A reader can see the individual lives of people, where they live, and how they interact with the people and the city that they live in all in one illustrative piece. Geospatial visualization overcomes the pitfalls of maps and makes for a more cohesive and compelling way to learn than just reading a book. Geospatial visualization, combining narratives with physical, visual data, makes forming historical inquiries and questions easier than it would be if they were separate. Finetuning geospatial visualization with other computational tools like computational text analysis could make it even more interesting and easier to use and learn from. Overall, geospatial visualization is a useful tool in better understanding the past and building historical inquiries and questions due to its effective illustration of the interconnectedness of physical space and narration.