I’ve been looking at Stanford’s Spatial History Project. They have many teams working on various projects that fall under the “spatial history” umbrella. Most of the projects take “spatial” to imply “geographical,” and some of the visualizations and subjects are enthralling. I’m looking right now at a visualization of the Rio di Janeiro slave market in the 1860s. Small purple dots represent the distance a given slave was forced to move as a result of being sold. Seeing a mass of dots rearrange across the city (or zoom in from off-coast, off the edge of the map, I assume after months as cargo in some ship’s hold after being kidnapped from their homes), reinforces a central problem with McPherson’s essay’s implied metaphor of social consciousness as societal operating system—that computer software is a dense layer of abstractions rooted in the fixed or changing states of binary logic gates, while a social construct has, at root, human lives. The visualization of the slaves’ movement is visually similar to watching electric flows in an educational video about circuits, transistors, computer chips…but I feel something watching the slave trade visualization because there is genuine human meaning underneath. I had a lot of problems with McPherson’s essay, but this might sum it up best. I think her comments about modularity and computer systems are uninformed, all surface, and cheapen both social criticism and computer engineering—in the former case because social life is ineffable, complicated, imbued with human significance, and not easily wrenched into service of vague metaphor; in the latter because the dizzying complexity and imaginative feats and pansocietal efforts that comprise the history of computer development are disserved by essays that avoid seriously grappling with their technical and historical elements.
The Spatial History Project also brings to mind an inherent tension in Earhart’s essay. It’s hard to put in words, but I think it has to do with an impulse unique to our digital moment. The impulse is to aggregate and preserve cultural documents and artifacts with the aid of developing technologies that are only in the last couple decades really approaching the sheer memory capacity to allow such work to be done exhaustively. The tensions are weird. One impulse is to preserve as much as possible before pre-digital texts are lost to decomposition, misplacement, and misadventure. This impulse implicitly acknowledges that cultural artifacts are limited and being lost. But it is just as true that we are developing technologies that can digitize in new ways—new software and new digital approaches themselves constitute new artifacts to create and archive. What we can do with new software is limited more by imagination than the amount of data—so when I see something like a visualization of a city’s slave trade, I’m pressed to ask of Amy Earhart how we choose not only what we install in new canons (literary and otherwise), but how we install them, in what form, by what criteria do we decide. Is it enough to elevate neglected writers to parallel status with “great men,” or should we create new methods for analyzing and representing their work that has nothing to do with the way we treated writers in the past? Should there be parity in form or bandwidth share, or both? Should there be no parity? Does parity mean anything in the virtual landscape? There is both not enough and too much to ingest and put out, too few inherited structures privileging historically dominant hierarchies and too many options for moving forward. It seems that in such an environment the focus shouldn’t be constructing a new canon but promoting the idea that there is no canon, never has been, never will be—there have been institutions promoting and laying claim to canons, but they were speaking more loudly, not more truthfully. Replacing their hegemony should be an anti-hegemony. This runs up against the question of whether anarchy is the only thing that can truly replace racist/sexist/other hierarchies…and I don’t know.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=143&project_id=0
