Mapping the World of History

The semester is drawing to a close, and my weeks are now one, big, long never-ending day filled with project after project. The end is in sight, and yet there is still a long way to go.

One of these projects is for my Digital History class, which asked that we explore some new area of digital history and try it out. It was basically an exercise I learning something new, and having something to put into our portfolios for when we eventually graduate (which admittedly at this point does not feel like it is going to happen).

For this project I chose to explore the world of GIS and see how it can be applied to history. GIS stands for Geographical Information System and it was developed in the late 1980s by academic geographers. It was initially designed to represent quantitative data, and was used almost exclusively for social scientific information. This has been steadily changing in recent years as GIS technology has been applied to history. It has been developing so quickly in fact that there is now a separate category for GIS in history, creatively named Historical GIS (HGIS).

In history GIS technology has been used mainly for spatial representations and information. It has been used to visually show a historical event, such as the movements of an army on a battlefield, or the spread of a disease through a city, or even how the parameters of a location have changed over time.

For my project I decided to apply this technology, and its visual capabilities to the Fathom Five National Marine Park and see if I could tell its geological and cultural history more effectively through this location based system. I used a program called ArcGIS, developed by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri). They developed a program called storymaps, which is what I used to communicate my information.

 

I really liked this program, it was easy to use, and it easily combined GIS information with historical photos and information.

Map with GIS data over-layed. The boundaries of the park and the bathymetry of the park.

I used the ArcGIS online database to access the boundaries of the park, and the underwater topographic information, but I also added points of my own. The Fathom Five park is home to twenty-two shipwrecks, which are used to preserve and study shipping history on the Great Lakes. I discovered that the parks website had a map of these wrecks, but that the map was not interactive. Through the GIS software I was able to change that.

The history of the Fathom Five National Park is something close to my heart, as it is an important part of the development of my hometown. I have visited this park many times and every time I am blown away by its beauty and wealth of history. This is only part of the reason I chose to explore the parks history through GIS. This technology and its application to history is a rapidly growing field, and one that I think could change the way that historians approach researching and representing events from the past. In the words of Jack Dangermond, the creator of ArcGIS, “The application of GIS is limited only by the imagination of those who use it”

If you want to see the finished storymap follow this link! The Fathom Five National Marine Park storymap

Portraying Dark History and the Challenges of Techonology

One of the assignments in my Digital History class was working with my fellow graduate students to create a dark history walking tour of London, Ontario. Our assignment was to each create a page for the tour, after researching a moment of dark history from London's Victorian past. We walked out a route, decided on various points and chose people and places that all fit together into one cohesive walking tour. After all this was done the Death, Destruction and Disgrace in Victorian London tour was born. Sounds simple right?

We very quickly discovered that the technology we were using to create our tour was not the most user friendly. Despite being given a personal walk through of the technology, there were still many challenges and unknowns that we had to over come to make something that looked polished and professional. Most of the time the app worked well, but when it didn't it REALLY didn't. The biggest lesson I learned from this assignment was that you need to leave ample time between when you complete a project, and when it is going to be used by the public, because there are a lot of things that can go wrong. A few days before our tour was set to go public, the entire system that supported it crashed. Because of this we had to do some quick thinking, and convert all of our pages to pdf format so that our test group could still use the tour. Eventually everything worked out, but inevitably the final 3 days before the due date will be the most stressful and will be when everything goes wrong. This is the way of digital history.

The second part of this blog post is on how dark history should be portrayed, or if it should be portrayed at all. Each person and event in our Death, Destruction and Disgrace tour contained some rather dark information, hence the term dark history. One issue we had to wrestle with is if we should be presenting this information for the amusement of others, because essentially that is what this tour was designed to do; educate but also amuse.

The person that I chose to research and present was Cornelius Burley, whose hanging was one of the most unique in London's history. He was the first, and the second man hung at the London courthouse and recent scholarship suggests that he was innocent of his crime. He was accused of murder, and later admitted to the crime after hours of interrogation from Reverend Jackson. This confession was read by Jackson at Burleys hanging, and was later published into a pamphlet and distributed throughout London.
After his death, Burley's body was dissected immediately at the site of the hanging in front of the 3000 people who attended. This practice was not uncommon, and acted as a kind of second show. Burley's skull was taken by the famous phrenologist Orson Squires Fowler on an international tour across America and Europe. This skull eventually ended up back at Eldon House museum, and was buried in 2001.
I found that my subject in particular had a very hard life, death and afterlife full of humiliation and pain. This made the decision to feature Burley's demise on the tour all the more important.

Cornelius Burley's skull

Orson Squires Fowler

To go along with this tour, we had a lot of classes on how dark history should be portrayed, and if it should be portrayed at all. It is a hard topic, especially for people like myself and my classmates who want to be able to communicate all kinds of history. How historical people and information is represented is an especially important consideration when dealing with hard topics. The exploitation of history and heritage is an unfortunate reality of the field that I am looking at getting into. My class was not making any money off of our tour of London, but if we had been, one thing to consider is if it is right to be making money off of the deaths and disgrace of past figures.

This topic continued throughout many of my classes, and one topic that was brought up again and again was the Holocaust. How, as public historians, should we approach this horrifying moment in history? There are many sites connected to the Holocaust that already exist. Many concentration camps are part of tours across Europe designed specifically around these sites, and many different approaches are taken. As with many facets of history, there really is no one right answer. My conclusion is that if we are doing our best to remain empathetic and respectful then there is really no recipe for how to portray dark history.