Visualization and Landscape in the Digital Humanities

What does “landscape” mean for digital humanities?
In the fields of traditional literary and cultural
studies, representations of real and imagined
landscapes have routinely been scrutinized as windows
into particular cultural moments, spaces in which complex
relationships between humans in their natural and
constructed environments are worked out and assigned
social, political, and cultural meaning. Digital humanities
have developed a rather different sense of the term,
however. Maps of the publication and circulation of
printed texts, spatial visualizations of historical urban
plans, three-dimensional reconstructions of archeological
sites: all these and more have now attained the status
of “landscapes” in the digital humanities, for they situate
texts and cultural artifacts in space and time. Yet even as
such technology-driven approaches continually reshape
the “humanities research landscape” (to use the term in a
different sense) they also raise new questions about the
kinds of intellectual activities they promote, testing what
Martyn Jessop has recently called the “dynamic process”
of creating knowledge (Edmond 2005; Jessop 2008).
This paper explores the changing significance of “landscape”
as a keyword in the humanities, one whose relevance
is amplified dramatically by the turn toward
technologies of visualization and the development of
theoretical and methodological frameworks for integrating
such technologies into more conventional forms of
textual scholarship. Using as a test case a small set of
eighteenth-century Anglophone texts that theorize landscape
aesthetics and deploy tropes of real and imagined
landscapes to reflect on contemporary cultural relations
across the Atlantic, I argue that methods for representing
some of their salient features in visual rather than textual
forms suggest new ways of understanding cultural exchange
in a historical moment characterized by intense
anxieties about the temporal and spatial distances separating
England from its North American colonies during
the “British diaspora” (Tennenhouse 2007). This claim,
and the specific visual representations that support it,
forms the basis for considering how models of textuallymediated
cultural authority were themselves constructed
at the nexus of space and time represented by landscape
aesthetics. This latter claim extends what might initially
seem to be a straightforward literary and historical argument
to the present moment in digital humanities. Examining
these cultural constructions through the lens of
digital visualizations affords insight into the present-day
relationship between scholars’ interpretive acts and the
cultural weight we grant such activities when they happen
in and through digital media.
In 1690, a short tract titled The Geometry of Landskips
and Paintings Made Familiar and Easie, published in
London, noted the artifice involved in landscape representation:
“The Geometry of Painting is rather Optick
or Perspective, than real…A Landskip is therefore a
rather neat contraction or Epitome of things visible than
a real view of them.” Though somewhat cryptic, the
anonymous pamphleteer’s opening remarks expose the
carefully crafted fiction that landscape paintings represent
real places as they actually are; to the contrary, he
insists, landscapes are deliberately compressed expressions
of an idealized, imaginary world—the world as we
would like to see it. In this regard, the pamphlet’s frank
admission of the ideal landscape’s constructedness confirms
the common view among literary scholars and cultural
historians that textual and visual landscapes have
historically naturalized ideologies of power and authority
within the contours of real and imagined geographic
space (Barrell 1972, 1980; Bermingham 1986; Williams
1973).
Yet the pamphlet’s titular promise to make landscape
“Familiar and Easie” resonates also with this paper’s
examination of the present-day digital humanities “landscape,”
and particularly the role of visualization in advancing
both close and “distant” reading practices. With
calls in some quarters for “a new object of study…in
which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate
reduction and abstraction,” and with the increasing
conviction that text visualizations furnish that object,
the question of graphical and visual literacy has become
all the more pressing (Moretti 2000). As Jessop notes,
“Humanists… have little in the way of visual literacy,”
an observation which leads him to conclude that collaboration
between digital humanities projects and artists is
necessary in recognition of the fact that “aesthetics are
deeply embedded in the effective use of the medium of
digital visualization” (Jessop 2008). That visual literacy
is no more “familiar” or “easy” for many now than it was
at the end of the seventeenth century suggests that the
historical evolution and function of landscape has much
to teach us about the current promises and pitfalls of humanities
visualization.
It is on this point that my paper’s examination of visualizing
patterns of reference in a small set of eighteenthcentury
Anglo-American texts advocates the usefulness of thinking in broader terms about “the digital” as
a landscape in its own right—a landscape that exposes
rather than conceals its own constructedness and, in so
doing, reveals new modes of legitimating and authorizing
the scholarly activities to which it belongs. In other
words, by regarding visualizations as composing another
kind of landscape it becomes possible to ask how
digital humanities, in the process of collecting, shaping,
and presenting textual data, themselves participate in
what amounts to a regime of aesthetic judgment. Like
the landscape aesthetics of the eighteenth century, the
interpretive lexicon authorized by digital visualization
raises new questions about scholarly authority, models
of judgment, standards of evidence—indeed, questions
not only of how we read and interpret texts but also who
is authorized to read them in particular ways. The idea
of landscape has historically been deeply involved in
negotiating the transmission of cultural authority. Its renewed
formal significance for scholars grappling with
the relationship between quantitative textual or spatial
data and the “fuzziness” of highly subjective interpretive
practices (to mention but one scenario) in which, once
again, authority is stake, is therefore highly germane to
the methodologies that inform scholarly practice at the
intersection of digital and non-digital humanistic inquiry.
References
Anonymous. (1690). The Geometry of Landskips and
Paintings Made Familiar and Easie. London: Richard
Baldwin.
Barrell, J. (1980). The Dark Side of the Landscape: The
Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Barrell, J. (1972). The Idea of Landscape and the Sense
of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John-
Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bermingham, A. (1986). Landscape and Ideology: The
English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Edmond, J. (2005). The Role of the Professional Intermediary
in Expanding the Humanities Computing Base.
Literary and Linguistic Computing, 20: 367-380.
Jessop, M. (2008). Digital Visualization as a Scholarly
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293.
Moretti, F. (2000). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models
for a Literary Theory. New York: Verso.
Tennenhouse, L. (2007). The Importance of Feeling
English: American Literature and the British Diaspora,
1750-1850. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. New
York: Oxford University Press.