Digital Cartographies of Affect

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Digital Cartographies of Affect

End-Semester Project

Sujaan Mukherjee

Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics

School of Cultural Texts and Records


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Introduction

Michel de Certeau wrote in The Practice of Everyday Life, Every story is a

travel-storya spatial practice.1Likewise, it may also be said that every space or

every place has a story to it. This paper tries to explore ways of arranging

narratives on digital media, through hyper-textual connections between time and

space. The paper is divided broadly into three sections dealing with a brief

(second-hand) history of cartography and of the philosophy of representing space

on a map; the evolution into the digital domain and its present-day concerns; and

my own engagement with it in terms of mapping fictional terrain and attempting

to represent personal narratives using digital media.

I. A Brief (Second-hand) History of Cartography

Being born into a culture where maps are extremely familiar, indeed, the

stuff of school finals, it is impossible and perhaps irrelevant for the purpose of

this paper to delve into the question of whether or not maps (as we know them)

are part of an exclusively Western/European tradition. The reasons may be

metaphysical, that is, to do with Indian philosophies of representing graphically

on two-dimensional surfaces, or physical, such as availability of writing or drawing

material and difficulties of preservation. It is argued, however, that sages like

Saunaka, Arya Bhatta, and Bhaskara had calculated cosmic distances with a greater

degree of accuracy than most Western astronomers. 2 One of the problems of

exploring a field like cartography is the relative ignorance of its technicalities,when looked at from an un-rigorous Cultural Studies perspective. It is easy to

misread the Mercator projection as an expression of Western arrogance and

politics of representations (as when Edward Terry presented his map to the

Mughal emperor), when in fact it is merely a nautical necessity in order to measure

distances in an efficient manner. Misra and Ramesh provide a fine example of this

1Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1984), p. 115.2R.P. Misra and A. Ramesh, Fundamentals of Cartography, Revised and Enlarged(New Delhi: ConceptPublishing Company, 1989), p. 31. Available at www.dli.gov.in.


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in their book: while designing a new building for Geography at the University of

Mysore, they asked the engineer to spare a 24x36 ft. room for cartography. The

engineer replied, I can provide you with only one room of this size; may I

suggest, sir, that you use it for mapping and fix the catastrophe [sic] laboratory in asmaller room.3

Of the Greeks and Romans, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, and Ptolemy are

noted for their mathematical accuracy. Their relative resistance to allegorizing

space comes across as especially remarkable when we the subsequent long and

easy tradition that map-making has of

doing so. The Dark Age of map-

making, so to speak, came with the

Roman Empire and flowed well into

medieval Christianity. One of the more

prominent types of map to dominate the

medieval imagination was the T in O

map. Isidore of Sevilles map4shows the

Earth as divided among the three sonsof Noah.

One of the landmarks in the history of cartography seems to have been the

translation of Ptolemys Geographica into Latin in 1405. This date is seen by many

as one of the major turning points in human perceptions of geographical space,5

and as with several other fields, in this too, perhaps, the European Renaissance

marked a move away from allegory and towards a more empirical ideal. Abraham

Orteliuss maps are something of a culmination, and a new beginning. A prolific

publisher, he even suggested an archaic prototype of the continental-drift theory,

which would in times to come prove to be right! Perhaps the truly awe-inspiring

aspect of the new kind of map-making is the point-of-view that it offered. It is a

3Ibid., p. 1.4http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/T_and_O_map_Guntherus_Ziner_14

72.jpg5G.C. Dickinson,Maps and Air Photographs, (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), for one sees this asan important event.


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position outside of the terrain that human beings would not be able to attain for

another four centuries, at least. The leap of the imagination may not be quite as

startling as it seems at first, since the map need not necessarily have been

imagined from that perspective, being drawn gradually from bits and pieces ofnautical measurement and information. Rather, the perspective or the possibility

of perspective that it offered must have been truly staggering in context.

Over time the connection between maps and colonial enterprise grew

stronger. The inexactitude often resulted in hilarious situations, such as the time

when in 1708 an article was printed in the Monthly Miscellany of Memoirs for the

Curious which purported to be a letter from a Spanish Admiral named

Bartholomew de Fonte giving an account of his travels in search of the North

West Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. J. N. De LIsle, for one, fell for the

hoax, even though, we are told, the account bore some marks of a work by

Defoe.6Starting from the Middle-Ages games could be found which took as their

playing surface available maps of the world. Le Jeu du Monde was one of the

more popular French varieties, and in 1770 The Royal Geographical Pastime

was published, which allowed the player to explore the world through 103stopping places. For example 77 Patagonia here the traveller must stay one

turn, to see the supposed race of giants, with which we have been lately amused.7

Even so, Jonathan Swifts prophecy:

So Geographers inAfric maps

With Savage Pictures fill their gaps;

And oer unhabitable Downs

Place Elephants for want of Towns.continued to be fulfilled well into the twentieth century. Hill notes (the

comparison too is hers) how an group of Sappers surveying a part of Africa

discovered at the end of a hard days work that they had one hill yet to draw.

Exhausted by the days events, they decided to ascribe an arbitrary shape to it.

One of them had an animal cut out, which was deemed a suitable shape for the

6

Gillian Hill, Cartographical Curiosities(London: The British Library, 1978), p. 29.7Ibid., pp. 7-8. Seehttp://eticproject.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/game-of-the-overland-route-to-india.jpegforWilliam Salliss Dioramic Game of the Overland Route to India(1852-1863).
http://eticproject.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/game-of-the-overland-route-to-india.jpeghttp://eticproject.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/game-of-the-overland-route-to-india.jpeghttp://eticproject.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/game-of-the-overland-route-to-india.jpeghttp://eticproject.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/game-of-the-overland-route-to-india.jpeghttp://eticproject.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/game-of-the-overland-route-to-india.jpeghttp://eticproject.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/game-of-the-overland-route-to-india.jpeg


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hill, and so it is still marked in Sheet 17 of Africa [Gold Coast] 1:62,500.8She

remarks that Cartographers do not change. But they do.

II. Digital Cartography

A common sentiment found among cartographers is The maps of our

earth which we use today are better and more plentiful than at any time in

history.9 Every age, post-enlightenment, can almost certainly make this claim.

The question at the heart of Digital Cartography is what exactly is digitization

converting from analogue to digital, and this is something I am struggling toanswer. Is there any such conversion that is taking place or are these merely

digitally drawn representations of analogue shapes and sizes? The initial problem

faced in any attempt to answer this is that there are so many kinds of digital maps.

One common feature in which they seem to differ from any paper map is that

they are or can be zoom-enabled. But so are digitized versions of analogue maps.

In its extreme form (as yet) a digital map such as Google Earth can allow street-

views, customizable viewed-objects (one can eliminate vegetation or mark outroads), even historicity. Satellite images ensure a degree of objectivity and accuracy

that would foil the efforts of Bartholomew de Fonte. The difference may also lie

in a potentially visible vertical layering or stratification in the maps, which is

different from simply painting land, sea, rivers and hills onto a 2D surface. The

exact technology that Google uses may be found online and need not form part of

this papers theoretical discussion, before a more detailed understanding of them

is achieved.

The other major advantage of digital cartography (indeed of digital data in

general) is that of storage space. In On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges

speaks of an Empire in which the Art of Cartography had attained such

Perfection that the Cartographers managed to create a 1:1 map of the Empire. It

stretched exactly over the land, but over time the the Inclemencies of Sun and

8Ibid., p. 81.9Dickinson, p. 1.


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Winters saw to it that little but tattered ruins remained in deserted places, as the

last relics of their discipline of Geography.10We may be safely out of such danger

because by the creation of virtual space the need to generate ever-increasing space

for physical occupants has been considerably reduced. Yet, the paradox of Borgesarguably remains, that if I were to view a map that shows my computer in its exact

size, inside my bedroom, Id be viewing the same thing within that screen, ad

infinitum, and we truly have not reached the ability to calculate the amount of data

that would imply.

The other major advantage of digital maps, of course, is that they may be

interactive in terms of the time-line. I may wish to create a map of the movement

of, say, the Chinese community in Calcutta and their establishments, over time.

This can be represented digitally, where to do this on paper it would have required

drawing the same maps over and over again with minor variations, and constant

shifting of papers to get the temporal aspect. The question of remote availability is

also of great importance. Neatline,for one, offers such a tool, but in many cases

sophisticated programmes require one to buy webspace. Only a fair amount of

original research and a significant body of data may be able to justify the purchase,even if it is with institutional support. Digital cartography, at least at an amateur

level, consists mostly of Photoshop or Campaign Cartographer maps, which do

not seem to be interactive or carry the full power of the digital medium.

The online Cartographers Guild (requires membership) allows one to

upload such maps and share with fellow cartographers. In most cases these are

simplistic renderings of analogue maps, even though some, like Max are fairly

sophisticated. There are more intense participants in this exercise too, such as

Austrialian train driver, Ian Silva. Silva has created an entire ring of islands, called

the Koana Islands, that are between Madagascar, Indonesia and Australia, and

produceda map of mind-boggling detail.Basically, all of it is me, Silva says. His

principal concerns have been imposed on the map. He hates it when people are

late (he is a train-driver!), likes honesty, and dislikes small-talk. He sees maps as a

10Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science in Collected Fictions, 1946, translated by AndrewHurley.http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf
http://neatline.org/http://neatline.org/http://www.cartographersguild.com/members/-+max+--albums-max-s+maps+%28personnal%29-picture58419-ireland-1703-first-part-my-entry-cg-10-13-challenge-map-place-two-times-1st-place-%A9-2013-all-rights-reserved.jpghttp://www.cartographersguild.com/members/-+max+--albums-max-s+maps+%28personnal%29-picture58419-ireland-1703-first-part-my-entry-cg-10-13-challenge-map-place-two-times-1st-place-%A9-2013-all-rights-reserved.jpghttp://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2013/08/Koana_map.pnghttp://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2013/08/Koana_map.pnghttp://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2013/08/Koana_map.pnghttp://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2013/08/Koana_map.pnghttp://www.cartographersguild.com/members/-+max+--albums-max-s+maps+%28personnal%29-picture58419-ireland-1703-first-part-my-entry-cg-10-13-challenge-map-place-two-times-1st-place-%A9-2013-all-rights-reserved.jpghttp://neatline.org/


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way of expressing himself.11Speaking of viewing New York from the 110 thfloor

of the WTC, Michel de Certeau writes, To what erotics of knowledge does the

ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong? Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in

it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of seeing the whole, of lookingdown on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts. 12 One wonders

whether the power to create a text like a map involves some of the erotics of

knowledge or erotics of knowledge/power that I assume de Certeau is referring

to.

This brings into the discussion questions of aesthetics and authority. Could

one look forward to cartographies as a new form of engagement along the lines of

literature, cinema, or the other finer arts? Perhaps not. Or may be the creation of

spaces can render even more fertile the imaginations of people who may wish to

read these maps and weave their own stories into the texture. The question of

power is also very interesting, in terms of the use a particular map is put to.

Consider the lines spoken by Tamburlaine in Christopher Marlowes Tamburlaine,

The Great:

I will confute those blind geographers

That make a triple region in the world,

Excluding regions which I mean to trace,

And with this pen reduce them to a map,

Calling the provinces, cities, and towns,

After my name and thine, Zenocrate: IV.iv13

There is a definite totalizing power that is at work here. Early maps of Calcutta, as Keya

Dasgupta points out, show at least two major differences in purpose. The maps designed

by the British are for the purpose of planning, from above. On the other hand

Romanauth Dasss Kalikatar Naksha (1884) is For the use of the common people,

providing as it were, a visual directory of the city.14The analogue binary of totalizing

11 http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/08/fictional-koana-islands-maps/12Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkely: Universityof California Press, 1984), p. 92.13Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, the Great, 1590. Accessed at

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1094/1094-h/1094-h.htm

14Keya Dasgupta, The Collection of Maps at the Visual Archives of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,Calcutta(Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 2009), p. 15.


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mapping and the directory function is gradually being broken down with street view and

cosmicview being integrated into the same map.

III. Possible Projects

Thomas Mores map of Utopia is impossible to draw because of the geometric

measurements the text supplies us with. Trollope was literally all over the place with his

map of Barsetshire.15R.L. Stevenson on the other hand is supposed to have believed,

the author must know his countryside whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the

distances, the points of the compass, the place of the suns rising, the behavior of the

moon, should all be beyond cavil.16In his memoirs he tells us of his stay in the late Miss

McGregors cottage in 1881, where, while playing with her stepson Lloyd Osbourne he

happened to draw a map, beautifully coloured. As I paused upon my map of Treasure

Island, the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary

woods The next thing Iknew I had some papers before me and I was writing out a list

of chapters.17The engagement with physical space differs with different writers. James

Joyce would say to Frank Budgen, I wantto give a picture of Dublin so complete that

if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of

my book.18

The project I hope to complete by the end of the present course (2015) is to

document the experiences of my maternal grandparents, Sri Amal K. Chatterjee and Smt

Pramila Chatterjee. My grandfather joined as a photographer with the Indian Airforce

shortly after Indias independence and completed full service. My grandmother on the

other hand, was what one would today call a home-maker. The interesting thing about

the stories they tell is that they are not always exactly matching in detail. Perceptionsdiffer, but sometimes even minor facts. They changed their home-town a number of

times, moving almost all over India over a few decades. Being a professional Air-force

photographer, my grandfather did not have a great passion for photography. Material

was expensive and in most cases he would try and be extremely efficient and economical

15Hill, p. 24.16Ibid., 24.17

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rlstevenson/bl-rlst-wri-5.htm18Frank Budgen,James Joyce and the making of Ulysses and other writings, 1972, p. 69.http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/JoyceColl/JoyceColl-idx?id=JoyceColl.BudgenUlysses


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with the resources at hand, so he could use some of the left-over photo-paper to print

photographs of his own family. Most the photographs that he has in his collection are

record photographs of visits to monuments and temples, but some are of a more

exciting nature: i.e., they are taken using the airplane cameras, of other airplanes, of

paratroopers, etc. The photographs have been digitized by me, keeping in mind archival

standards and regulations. They can make a separate archival collection, while I intend to

use them to illustrate their narratives, which I am gathering over the course of time. The

process involves prodding them to tell me stories (stories for me, memories for them)

from their past, while I record them on a voice-recorder, to be transcribed and

organized.

The James Joyce Ulysses map that I have been working on offers a growingcollection of multimedia that is associated with the novel. One of the problems I faced

while reading Ulysseswas that of familiarity with the colours and sounds. I have tried to

address these as far as possible in the map. However, as an independent product, one

could even use such a map to raise questions regarding the nature of the unfolding of the

narrative. A typically linear narrative can be made to unfold in time if the path is not pre-

defined by the tour builder him/herself. The user may, then, point not to events in the

novel to discover what the associated media is, but to a place to learn the stories that

unfold there. The distinction, as mentioned earlier, between the two ways of viewing are

blurred. The reason why I chose Ulysses as a text is because I was unable to find a

satisfactory, comprehensive resource online. Besides, some of the material that I was able

to use was gathered by myself or through friends or colleagues. It was designed more as a

prototype before I would go on to design a similar narrative for my grandparents.

The advantage of using an internet medium is that it allows one to connect

hyper-textually between the spatial and the temporal. Alongside the map each city inwhich they have resided would ideally carry in associated media photographs taken there

(accompanied by relevant metadata), and the stories in brief. The stories, that is the

verbal narrative, will be hyperlinked with a blog that will be running alongside the spatial

representation. Perhaps we can even try to ask some questions about affective

cartographies, where a map is used to narrate an entirely subjective account, that would

make us rethink the geography or even to distort it. One thinks ofpatuasof Bengal who

would use scrolls (spatial unfolding of narratives) and vocal performances (temporal

unfolding) at the same time to tell a story. The story of Behula and Lakhindar (Manasa
http://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com/builder#play/ahJzfmd3ZWItdG91cmJ1aWxkZXJyEQsSBFRvdXIYgICAoLDpqgoMhttp://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com/builder#play/ahJzfmd3ZWItdG91cmJ1aWxkZXJyEQsSBFRvdXIYgICAoLDpqgoMhttp://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com/builder#play/ahJzfmd3ZWItdG91cmJ1aWxkZXJyEQsSBFRvdXIYgICAoLDpqgoMhttp://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com/builder#play/ahJzfmd3ZWItdG91cmJ1aWxkZXJyEQsSBFRvdXIYgICAoLDpqgoMhttp://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com/builder#play/ahJzfmd3ZWItdG91cmJ1aWxkZXJyEQsSBFRvdXIYgICAoLDpqgoM


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Mangal Kavya) is seen as charted along the course of the river Gangur, with the incidents

taking place in blurbs in different places on the river path.

Conclusion

It is with this project in mind that I have set out the theoretical frameworks that I

have considered. It seems most appropriate to me to incorporate as much as possible in

terms of narrative dynamism while telling a story that is richly supplied with photographs

and oral accounts. The theoretical aspects, considered even without the projected

practical outcome, seem interesting, because one could argue that map-making is at a

moment in its history where it is trying to deal with changes of enormous proportions.

Given the post-modern tendencies in cultural production, one cannot help wondering

about the possibilities that digital cartographies open up also for students of post-

colonial or diaspora studies: both in terms of creating maps of affect, and in terms of

writing histories on maps while balancing the spatial and the temporal.

Documents

Digital Cartographies of Affect