Encoding the ‘Floating Gap’: Linking Cultural Memory, Identity, and Complex Place

In his essay on collective and cultural memory, theorist Jan Assmann points out the metonymous nature and mnemonic function of landscape through time. Drawing on Jan Vansima’s coining of the term “floating gap” to describe the slippage between intergenerational collective memory and reified cultural memory Assmann foregrounds the necessarily metonymic nature of memory. One of the major mnemonic devices of both cultural and collective memory is that of landscape and the names that cultures and the agents of their institutions give features within it.
In this poster the authors build upon work developed over two years – proposed first at DH2018 and expanded upon at the Linked Pasts IV conference – and present a model for encoding what ethnographers term the “floating gap” when constructing an historical gazetteer of place names. This step is especially crucial as scholars make intersections and linkages between place-based, data-driven research projects. Initially proposing a modification of the model put forward by Grossner, Janowicz and Kessler for building out digital historical gazetteers, the authors expand their argument that the concepts for Event and Place used to encode semantic relationships overlook the fact that it is the Actor or Agent who names the events, and thus by extension names the places at which those events occurred. As multiple agents participate in, witness, and/or record events, and the multiple perspectives of those agents directly impact upon descriptions of events, then the place names connected with those events must correspond to those multiple agents. Agents’ perspectives and identifications of place draw irrevocably on their identities and unique authorities. In traditional humanistic terms these multiplicities of relationships of persons to places is the stuff of critical interpretation. In the brave new world of linked data, the vagaries of named places constitute a vexed problem, and attempts to resolve the messiness and fuzziness of place, time, and perspective run the risk of eliding the floating gap of cultural memory.
Drawing on the case study of the Moravian Lives project, which contains many place names in colonized spaces in North America, the authors model Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a place described by cultural representatives as diverse as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 19th-century American writer, Juliet H. Lewis Campbell (aka Judith Canute) and Oneida Sachem Shikellamy. We consider the importance of the “agent” in an event that occurs within a particular temporo-spatial setting. By including agent(s) within this model we thus can deepen the “geosemantic” approach to place that recognizes that a place may be the setting for many events of significance, that significance being dependent on the view of the naming agent.
In a larger sense, we ask how, as digital humanities projects move into a phase where historical place data is linked, can we resist the givenness of authority names? If we apply a metonymic chain of place names rather than subordinated variants can we “call to mind” the cultural and collective memories that form identities around place? Can we assign such a metonymic naming to place and therefore respect the multiplicity of peoples’ cultural memories about those places?

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