Scholars' Lab

As I explained in my last blog post, my dissertation will compare several statements about the final fate of humankind in Paul to similar statements in apocalyptic texts. In that post, I described how text-mining could help with the interpretation of the texts which stand at the center of my dissertation. In this post, I will discuss how geographic information systems (GIS) can help to visualize geographic relationships among texts. My ideas here, as in my first blog post, are the result of conversations with other staff members here at the Scholars’ Lab. The question that I pose and answer in this blog post is, What does geography have to do with the analysis of biblical texts? The short answer is, “Much, in every way.” But I can’t just assert that, I need to show it.

Historical-critical study of the Bible has understood for the last two hundred years that the historical circumstances of any person or group profoundly affect the literature that that person or group produces. And scholars understand geographical location to be an integral part of any author’s historical circumstances. I was always dubious about the ability of GIS to help me with my research into the Apostle Paul. After all, scholars have no more evidence for Paul’s geographic location than he gives in his letters, and scholars have already thoroughly discussed this evidence. Another basic tenet of historical-criticism, however, is that we understand an author’s history better when we put it in relationship to the histories of other authors. This goes for geography as well. That means that I should put Paul in geographical relationship with the apocalyptic texts I will study.

But this process will be more than simply plotting each work’s points of origin on a map. Since GIS is driven by databases, one can query the databases and display the results geographically. For instance, I may find that certain texts assert that the Messiah will descend with angels before the final judgment. If I have geographical data for these texts, I can tell GIS to show the place of origin of all texts that meet these criteria. I could then discover that all of these texts come from a certain area or that they all fall along a certain trade route. I might also discover that they have no apparent geographical similarity. And that is the beauty of GIS. I can follow leads quickly enough that pursuing a red herring no longer requires wasted hours or days. I can check out multiple leads in the time it would take to follow one lead manually.

The ultimate question, however, is how this technology could help my research. One scenario will make its usefulness apparent. I will consider dozens of apocalyptic texts. If I find that a Paul shares some textual characteristic with only 2 of these texts, I would be hard pressed to show that these three sources by themselves demonstrate an historical pattern. But, if I could show that all three of these texts originated in approximately the same area at approximately the same time, I would show that the texts share more than just textual characteristics. This demonstration would relate the texts more closely to one another and thus strengthen my argument that the textual similarity represents a geographically specific historical pattern. Once such a pattern is recognized, I could interpret these three texts together to reach a fuller understanding of the textual characteristic that is partially represented in each text. And with GIS, one is not limited to analyzing one relationship at a time. One can also assign different symbols to texts depending on which characteristics they have. In this way, one can produce a graphical representation of textual features that may suggest relationships that otherwise would not have been clear. In the end, GIS technologies make it easier to analyze and visualize geographical relationships among texts. As a result, my interpretation of Paul would be based more firmly in Paul’s own historical circumstances.

So for the thousandth (or so it seems) time I’ve gotten into this discussion with my friends from the East Coast and Midwest (I’m from Texas) about the correct way to refer to a sweet carbonated beverage, and I have finally got to thinking about ways to map locally spoken slang and jargon using GIS.  Starting a database of ‘events’ where a person uses unique language in reference to a common-place item or occurrence (I have a friend from Wisconsin who calls the drinking fountain a “bubbler”) would be an insightful way to examine how jargon or slang starts and spreads geographically.

So I decided to indulge my curiosity and create a small database consisting of the answers to two quick survey questions; What do you call sweet carbonated beverages?, and what state do you identify yourself as being “from”?.  I solicited friends and colleagues for the answers to these questions and ended up with about 150 useable responses (if you were one of the people who responded with “beer”, I thank you for the interest in the survey, but your answer was not included).  I chose to ask this question (please bear in mind that linguistics is not a focus of my studies) because regardless what you refer to it as, most people have had experience with a coke/soda/soda-pop/pop, which isn’t true for all objects of regional jargon (example: before moving to the East Coast I had never seen nor heard of scrapple) and I wanted to document the geographical extent and overlap of a single object rather than attempt to compare multiple similar objects with this first foray.

Approximately 94% of respondents identified that they referred to sweet carbonated beverages as either “coke”, “soda”, “pop”, or “soda-pop”, so I chose to focus the mapping of this data on those four responses.  I took the responses I received and calculated a ‘count’ by state of each type of response; for example, I received a total of 4 responses from people who identified as being from the state of Missouri.  Three of the respondents refer to sweet carbonated beverages as “coke”, and one refers to it as “soda”.  I took these counts and normalized them to the total number of responses received from the state and used that percentage to map the responses by state broken into ~25%, ~50%, ~75%, and 100%.  For each response (coke, soda, pop, soda-pop) I chose a single color to represent responses on the map, and varied the transparency of the color to represent the percentage of the response (25% response = 75% transparency, 50% response = 50% transparency, 75% response = 25% transparency, and 100% response = 0% transparency).  I mapped all four responses separately first (figure 1).

I chose to vary transparency as opposed to saturation of color (eg: monochromatic choropleth) because I wanted to be able to overlap the response maps to visualize the confluence of the regional terms yet keep the original colors of each response (figure 2).

The map above shows the overlap of “coke” responses with “soda” responses, which are displayed by the variation in colors from bright red where 100% responses were “coke” to bright blue where 100% responses were “soda” and various shades of purple and pink in between where there was a mix of responses in that state.  This kind of map can be created using a map with a double ended scale, but that type of visualization is limited to displaying the spectrum between two absolute responses, which would mean that I could only display the confluence of two responses rather than all four (figure 3).

One interesting thing I noticed when looking at the results of this survey is that I need to meet more people from the Pacific Northwest section of the country.  The other interesting result I noticed which is more pertinent to the questions asked in this study is the confluence of the regional jargon that occurs in the region that includes Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.  This area represents the confluence of the “soda” and “pop” responses and is also the region with responses of “soda-pop”, a hybridization of “soda” and “pop”.

This exercise seems to make the argument that assembling databases of ideas such as regional jargon and using tools like GIS to display that information is a thought provoking and possibly worthwhile endeavor.  (I’d like to thank all of my friends and colleagues who participated in this survey that allowed me to assemble and produce this study for digestion by the blogosphere. Thanks, you guys!)

My wife and I frequently engage in a strange kind of “culture war.” She thinks ancient Rome is the more interesting civilization, and I’m partial to ancient Greece. In these debates, I always tell her that I prefer philosophers to politicians. Still, I was excited when I first encountered Rome Reborn, a joint project between UVA’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, a few other schools, and Google (who allows access to the project through Google Earth). The goal of Rome Reborn is to create a 3D digital model of ancient Rome in the year 320. There are plans to extend the project over time, so that you will be able to track the development and growth of the city over time. The buildings have all been reconstructed by computer modeling, and mapped onto Rome’s actual terrain. What a cool project.

I should say, before continuing, that if you want to check out Rome Reborn for yourself, you might have some trouble getting to it. First, you need to download Google Earth. Then, you need to turn on the “Ancient Rome 3D” layer, which listed under the “Gallery” layers. Next, get to Rome, zoom into the ancient city and click on a yellow building, which brings a popup window to add the ancient terrain, landmarks, and buildings. Then, you are finally ready to enjoy the model. (But be warned, if you don’t have a good computer with a fast processor and a hefty bit of RAM, you’ll only send yourself into conniptions rather than enjoy the grandeur of this ancient civilization.)

My first impression, in wandering through the reconstructed forum on Google Earth, was of how chock-a-block the buildings are. You realize how many of the buildings are right on top of one another. You do get this feeling in person, walking around the ruins, but the 3D model captures the hustle and bustle of a true big city that is not conveyed adequately by pictures alone. This project will help scholars puzzle over details of the architecture itself, but having it available to such a wide audience on Google will also help those just learning about Rome. It has the potential to spark students’ interest in learning—for me, this is well worth the effort.

Join us in the Scholars’ Lab Monday morning through Wednesday night next week, as we project the social media landscape surrounding next week’s historic presidential inauguration.

We’ll be showing real-time Twitter and Flickr feeds that record people’s responses to the event and their efforts at citizen-journalism. We’ve also created a home-grown geospatial visualization so that you can follow the worldwide conversation!

Visit the Lab for a little social interaction of your own, or access the site (which includes more information and related links) online.

For the past year, I have been working on the Scholars’ Lab Geospatial Data Portal, the lab’s effort to make our GIS data sets readily available to UVA students, faculty, and staff via the world wide web by using a suite of open source, open standards-based applications. A particular aspect of this project that I have enjoyed exploring is the way in which we display our visual information.

Stop to think about the last paper map you used. Minor roads were probably displayed with a line of a certain color and thickness, highways with another. Green spaces were colored differently from open water and buildings etcetera. Cartographers have long toiled to develop visual representations of our environment and make them identifiable for the greater use. People naturally associate certain colors on a map with identifiable features in their environment (eg: the association of green on a map to forests, parks, and open areas). Much like a book, these symbols and representations must create a language which is understandable to the audience; else the information contained on the map will go unutilized.

What I have done for the Geospatial Data Portal is to expand our symbolic vocabulary. I create styles; XML based documents which allow us to display visual information through symbols that our patrons will understand and identify with specific attributes. An example: I can map the waterlines for a given city with a solid pink line with a width of 2 pixels. While it is true that the information is mapped and is useful to an extent, I think there is a way to display the same information while making it more visually recognizable as city waterlines and ultimately making the information more useable to our patrons. Instead of a solid pink line of a single width, we can display the information as blue lines with differing widths dependant upon the size of the pipe (ex: a main line feeder pipe with a diameter of 15ft is represented as a blue line with a pixel width of 8, whereas a small pipeline with a diameter of 2ft is represented with a blue line with a 1 pixel width.

So what has this accomplished? People tend to associate size on a map with importance in the real world, so by exaggerating the size difference of the pipe by weighting pixel width we can draw our users’ attention to the important locations on the map. And by using blue, we identify our information of interest as a water feature because most people associate blue on a map with water features in their environment. Now our patrons are able to go from displaying simple lines on a page to creating a map which displays intuitively symbolized information using only their internet browser. I believe this project has the potential to greatly expand the user-base for our GIS data sets and allow for new forms of scholarship because it makes the process of displaying information in an identifiable and comprehensible much more user friendly.

Join us next Wednesday, November 19th, as we celebrate all things International GIS Day.  Anyone whose work is grounded in issues of space and place will find something of interest in these cross-disciplinary offerings, centering in cartography and geospatial technologies.

Of special note is a public lecture by David Rumsey, who has worked for a decade to offer open access to his remarkable private map collection through a variety of innovative tools and interfaces. Most recently, he has made historical maps available as layers in Google Earth and on an island in Second Life.  Mr. Rumsey will speak on “Giving Maps a Second Life with Digital Technologies” at 4 o’clock in the Harrison-Small auditorium.  This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Emerging Research, Scholarship, and Arts at UVA (CERSA) and the Scholars’ Lab, and a reception will follow the talk.

Schedule of Events:

Charlottesville Area GIS Users Lunch
with a talk by Dr. John Scrivani, Virginia Dept. of Forestry
12:00 – 1:30 in the Scholars’ Lab

GIS Day Cake Cutting
1:30 in the Scholars’ Lab

GIS Day Open House
with 10 different GIS user-groups and projects exhibiting!
1:30 – 2:45 in the Scholars’ Lab

Tour of “On the Map: The Seymour I. Schwartz Collection of North American Maps 1500-1800″
3:00 – 3:30 in the Small Special Collections Library

Speaker: David Rumsey
“Giving Maps a Second Life with Digital Technologies”
4:00 – 5:30 in the Harrison-Small Auditorium

Reception
5:30 – 6:30 in the Small Special Collections Library

Image from the David Rumsey Map Collection

“During the Zuni Molawia ceremonial of 1915, when the house-tops were crowded, the roof of one of the houses enlarged that season caved in. The accident occurred, people began to say, because turquoise had not been deposited under the floor of the new chamber.”

Elsie Clews Parsons

Pueblo Indian Religion Vol. 1, 1939, p.105

The quote above, read some time ago, was one of the first things I read that spoke to the deeper meaning of many of the “ritual deposits” found by archaeologists. Specifically, how these deposits were connected to built space. I have since encountered innumerable studies from Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Religious Studies, etc., that show how built space and the associated material are microcosms of a larger worldview. These studies demonstrate how space becomes place within a certain cultural logic. For example, in Mesoamerica among the ancient Maya, the quadripartite division of the world organized the gods themselves, ritual calendar (indivisible from the agricultural calendar), the layout of cities, the organization of hierarchy (as seen in four founding lineages noted in the Chilam Balam), the agricultural fields themselves (squares fields with each corner having an altar), the everyday house, the altar within the house, and even individual caches placed in the ground. This is what I like to call an iterative cosmology. This kind of layering can be seen across the globe. The interesting aspect of this link between worldview and space comes at the local level. It demands interpretation that takes local cultural logic seriously. For example, the above quote suggests that the building fell because of improper offerings, not necessarily only from a lack of structural integrity, or put another way, improper offerings led to a lack of structural integrity and thus the building fell.

What on earth does any of this have to do with digital technologies in the humanities? Well, for me the answer came when I tried to ask similar questions about cosmology in a society without surviving myths or writing. All of the studies I have seen come either from areas that do have existing origin myths and writing, or from ethnographic accounts in which the people themselves can explain. The area of northern Mexico (far outside of what is considered Mesoamerica) in which I am interested does not have either extant myths or writing. Yet given the iterative or multi-level, and spatial aspects of many (if not all) Native American belief systems, I believe these systems will leave material patterns behind. That is where GIS comes in.

I turned to GIS as I floundered to come up with a methodology that would allow me to identify spatial patterns. I had an archaeological site in mind and access to enough data about this site that would allow me to answer my questions, but I had little idea about how to get at the spatial aspect of the patterns I had hoped to investigate. GIS technology allows me to take the data I have digitized and not only display it graphically, but conduct a spatial analysis in order to identify spatial structure. Hopefully that spatial structure will help me understand the over-arching cosmological principles that were active in northern Mexico during the 12^th and 13^th centuries.

Thus, I am in the process of georeferencing (recently finished) original excavation maps, and digitizing all of the structures within this site (it’s an intra-site analysis), I will then plot artifact frequencies across the site along with certain cosmologically important architectural features (hearths and posts). All of this data comes from eight published volumes as well as unpublished field notes. None of it was in digital form before I started. From this I can pull actual coordinates of these things and run spatial statistics to ask a series of questions: do certain kind of artifacts group in certain areas of the site? Do the artifact assemblages in rooms that have offerings under the posts look different than assemblages in rooms without these kinds of offerings? If so how are the assemblages different? Where are the elaborated hearths in relation to posts with offerings? Are there discrete boundaries between areas with these elaborated hearths? Do the elaborated hearths co-occur with certain kinds of artifacts? And so on.

So here I am currently wrangling with large amounts of data to be sure it is internally consistent and get it into ArcMap as the first step. In the back of my mind is how I will disseminate this information. I have heard various ideas, but am currently not sure about some of the best ways to disseminate GIS data….but more on that later!