The digital era is providing us with timely opportunities to rethink the ways in which historical and geographical information is gathered, organized, and represented. Geolibraries, virtual museums, on-line archival databases, and other forays into the realm of digitality are taking advantage of increasing telecommunication and computing speeds, expanding storage capacities, Geographic Information Systems, digital reproduction technologies, and the Internet to construct widely accessible digital archives for scholarly, pedagogical, and public uses. The archive is a staple of historical geographical research, and this paper brings a historical geographical perspective to the archiving of digital geographic information and to the digital representation of historical archives.
The intention of this paper is to re-orient the manner in which digital archives are thought about, and in so doing contribute to the enhancement of the design, implementation, and use of digital archives. The language that is often employed to describe digital archives tends to emphasize the ways in which they differ from traditional archives. While the technological advances that digital archives entail certainly warrant the drawing of such distinctions, I argue that relevant distinctions may also be drawn between the archiving of digital information and the digitization of archival information. I focus on three examples of digital archives: the Digital Earth Project (http://www.digitalearth.gov/), the Digital Imaging the Media Technology Initiative (http://images.library.uiuc.edu/), and the Chicago Imagebase Project(http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/).
The Digital Earth project is a multi-institution research initiative which aspires to construct a “virtual representation” of the planet. This project will allow for the visualization and exploration of an immense range of georeferenced natural and cultural information, and, as such, it is an exemplary instance of the archiving of digital information. Conversely, the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Digital Imaging the Media Technology Initiative is digital preservation project which utilizes multimedia technologies to provide access to digital reproductions of its archival collections. Between these two projects stands the Chicago Imagebase Project. Also based out of the University of Illinois-Chicago, this project entails the digitization of historical and geographical media pertaining to Chicago’s built environment. But unlike the Digital Imaging the Media Technology Initiative, the Chicago Imagebase Project has begun to incorporate GIS and other Internet-based display and analysis technologies. Its georeferenced functional framework, which allows for the integration of archival and digital information, offers the potential for a greatly enriched digital archival experience.
This paper draws from my perspectives as both a historical geographer and an interested participant in the digital era. Historical geography requires that archival materials be situated within the contexts of their own production in addition to regarding them as information sources in their own right. Attention to the variations of form and context implicit within digital archives will contribute to the understandings and practices of both historical geography and digital archivization.
Such technological innovations are providing us with timely opportunities to rethink the ways in which historical and geographical information may be housed, organized, represented, and utilized. Amidst what has been called the “digital transition”,1 geolibraries, virtual museums, on-line archival databases, and other forays into the realm of digitality are taking advantage of increasing telecommunication and computing speeds, expanding storage capacities, GIS, and the Internet to construct digital archives for scholarly, pedagogical, and public uses. As Pickles notes, “digitality and representational technologies produce new codings and practices, and with them new possible geographies.” (1995, 286). It is the intention of this paper to explore and reflect upon some of the emergent geographies of the digital transition as expressed by the digital archive.
I examine three examples of digital archives, the Digital Earth project, the Digital Imaging the Media Technology Initiative, and the Chicago Imagebase Project, as they relate to the dual theme of this paper: archiving the digital and digitizing the archive. The Digital Earth project is a multi-institution research initiative which aspires to construct a “virtual representation” of the planet (http://www.digitalearth.gov/). This project will allow for the visualization and exploration of an immense range of georeferenced natural and cultural information, and, as such, it is an exemplary instance of the archiving of digital information. Conversely, the University of Illinois Digital Imaging the Media Technology Initiative is digital preservation project which utilizes multimedia technologies to provide access to digital reproductions of its archival collections (http://images.library.uiuc.edu/). Between these two projects stands the Chicago Imagebase Project (http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/). Based out of the University of Illinois-Chicago, this project entails the digitization of historical and geographical media pertaining to Chicago’s built environment.
The dual theme of this paper is intended to offer an alternative way
of thinking about digital archives. The language that is often employed
to describe new technologies tends to emphasize the ways in which they
differ from the technologies they replace. While the technological advances
that digital archives entail certainly warrant the emphasis of these differences,
I suggest that important insights may also be drawn from the distinction
between the archiving of digital information and the digitization of archival
information. This analytical distinction will form the basis for an examination
of some of the epistemological issues that bear upon our understandings
and uses of digital historical and geographical information. I follow my
exposition of the three digital archives I am employing as my case studies
with a consideration of the thought of Walter Benjamin, a German social
theorist whose ideas have rapidly gained currency within historical geography
in recent years. Benjamin’s provocative analyses of mechanical reproduction
technologies and of rapidly changing commodity forms in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries are, as I argue below, imminently pertinent
to any consideration of the technological innovations we are witnessing
during the contemporary digital transition. I focus on two key works by
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and
his unfinished Arcades Project, drawing key insights from each to contribute
to an enriched understanding of the design, implementation, and use of
digital archives.
The Digital Earth Project
In form that Gore conceives of it, the Digital Earth remains in a purely conceptual phase, but several small-scale and prototype digital earths already exist. The OpenGIS Consortium is collaborating with several federal agencies, including NASA and the Federal Geographic Data Committee, to develop a Web Mapping Testbed that facilitates access to and analysis of Web-based geospatial data (http://www.opengis.org/wmt/); NASA’s GLOBE Visualization server maps global environmental data in both GIF and VRML formats (http://digitalearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/geoview/); and NASA’s Global View From Space displays near-realtime atmospheric, oceanic, and land surface data gleaned from several satellite systems (http://farside.gsfc.nasa.gov/ISTO/dro/global/). These prototypes only begin to suggest what further advances in digital technology might bring to fruition.
The Digital Earth concept might be regarded as the latest in a long history of efforts on the part of humans to construct knowledge about the earth, to map it and make it legible, and to squelch what Derek Gregory (1994) calls our “cartographic anxiety” regarding that which is unknown and feared to be unknowable. The aporietic terra incognita of maps throughout much of the history of cartography attest to the fact that our geographical imaginations have always outstripped our ability to render the earth in legible forms. Today, the vigilant orbits of space age satellites have initiated what Vice President Gore calls a “flood of geospatial information,” the effect of which has been the exponential magnification of the age-old problem of earth writing.
The usual way of approaching this problem has been to employ some form of classification system by which to organize objects or data according to various conventions of similitude and differentiation. “A classification system,” write Bowker and Star, “is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put in order to then do some kind of work—bureaucratic or knowledge production” (1999, 10). Classification systems are thoroughly embedded in and profoundly structure our ways of knowing. The library and the archive are classic examples of a classification system in action: the thematic organization of their holdings allow us to construct knowledge in seemingly illimitable ways. Yet, if one were to look up information on a country in Africa in a typical library, one would compile a list of items strewn throughout the full extent of its holdings. Such a classification system may not be the most effective organizing principle by which to produce knowledge using information with spatial characteristics.
Gore suggests that our flood of geospatial information would be better served by a new operative metaphor, a cartographic framework of points, lines, and areas within which spatial information could be embedded. Thus, writes, Michael Goodchild, “rather than look in a filing cabinet under Z, someone interested in Zimbabwe would find it easier conceptually to reposition a digital globe to the right part of Africa (or to look up Z in a digital rendering of the back-of-the-atlas gazetteer, and see the globe repositioned automatically)” (1998). What is involved is, quite simply, the replacement of the thematic with the geographic as the primary classificatory regime.2 Thematic classification would of course be employed, but wholly as a function of geographical location. This, in short, is the fundamental premise of geolibraries such as the Digital Earth project.
If a flood of digital geospatial information is necessitating the use of a different operative metaphor, it is digital technology itself that is making possible the effective operationalization of that metaphor. We could well imagine a brick and mortar library built in the form of a map of the world, with its holdings consisting of shelves situated in their appropriate geographic locations within the library in accordance with the geographical information contained thereon. Or, to take the metaphor less literally, we might think of a library arranged by geographic rather than thematic classifications. If such libraries seem implausible, it is the rigidity of our thematic classificatory conventions, and not the characteristics of their holdings, that makes them so. Digital information, geospatial or otherwise, has long found itself rendered in analog form, be it printed and bound or stored on analog tape reels. By virtue of convention, analog forms of storage and display, whether the information is in digital or analog form, would not appear to lend themselves to geographic classificatory regimes.
One place where the geographical organization of information finds expression in an analog format is in the map itself. The representation of information as a function of place is precisely the role that any map performs. But the static, analog map imposes severe limitations upon the amount and the manipulability of the data contained therein. GIS, by rendering the map and its thematic data in digital form, effectively solved this problem. The Digital Earth concept is thus as much an extension of the analog map, by way of GIS, as it is an extension of the analog library (or archive) into the realm of digitality.
The relevance of the relationship between old and new technologies will
become more clear when I embark upon my discussion of the work of Benjamin.
At this point, I would like to conclude this part of my discussion by noting
that the digital archiving of digital information means something quite
different from the practice of archiving as it is traditionally regarded.
Digital archives such as the Digital Earth concept are enabling the operationalization
of the earth metaphor, of a geographic classificatory regime that is not
limited by the conventions of both analog storage and thematic classification.
Yet, just as both digital and analog information may be stored and displayed
in analog form, digital archives are also facilitating the digitization
(and digital archivization) of archival (analog) information. Digitized
analog information, such as book pages, photographs, paintings, and maps,
exhibit varying degrees of geospatiality, but for the most part, the digital
image remains organized under a thematic classificatory regime—although
many maps and aerial photographs clearly lend themselves to geo-referencing
(aerial photographs and USGS topo quads converted into geo-referenced digital
orthophoto quadrangles and digital raster graphs for instance). To explore
these issues further, I turn now to my case study of the digitization of
archival information: the Digital Imaging and Media Technology Initiative.
The Digital Imaging and Media Technology Initiative
More projects are in the planning stages, and the possibilities seem to be limited only by funding, technical resources, and the extent of its collections. Corporate sponsors have been keen to become involved in digital library projects—the DIMTI has garnered funding from Eastman Kodak, Intel, and Follett—and the National Science Foundation has established its own Digital Libraries Initiative (http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/) to provide support for the DIMTI and several other digital archives. The DIMTI is also serving as a gateway to other digital libraries such as the Art Museum Image Consortium Database and the Library of Congress, which is to suggest that the extent of its in-house collections may not be such a limiting factor after all. Indeed, the prospect of networking and interoperability between digital libraries by means of established platforms such as the Internet is a powerful impetus for their continued development.
Digital archives such as the DIMTI are usually structured according to the thematic classificatory regime by which the associated analog archive holdings are organized. Digital technologies enhance access to those holdings in digital form and provide flexible search options, but digital libraries and museums have yet to explore more avowedly geospatial approaches and directions. The technology that makes both digital libraries and the Digital Earth concept feasible also opens the possibility for their integration. Gore’s portrayal of an imaginary user of the Digital Earth offers insight into this potential:
One digital archive has begun to manifest some of the ways in which
geospatial and historical information might be integrated. The Chicago
Imagebase Project is a digital archive much like those created as part
of the DIMTI. It differs from the latter, however, in its more explicit
geospatial imperative, such that it begins to suggest what a highly localized
Digital Earth that incorporates digital archival information project might
look like.
The Chicago Imagebase Project
Upon entering the Imagebase the user is provided with three search options: a table of contents, a keyword “text search,” and a visual “map search.” The table of contents divides the Imagebase into thematic sections which include ongoing projects, historical maps, historical and recent photographic images, and visual material indexes. The keyword search is simply a search engine for the Imagebase which gives users a listing of all documents containing the word being searched for. The map search, which is currently in a prototype phase, entails a series of linked imagemaps which will allow the user to conduct searches of the site’s holdings by geographical location.
The scanned image collection is fairly extensive, and ranges from historical maps, to era-by-era photographic collections, to scans of pages and images from historical books and city directories, to contemporary photographic collections. Among the site’s holdings are digital scans of Robinson’s Atlas of Downtown Chicago. An index map from the original atlas has been imagemapped into sections that are hyperlinked to high resolution scans of individual atlas pages. Although not yet operational, the Atlas index map itself will eventually be hyperlinked to an Imagebase index imagemap as part of the “map search” option.
Among the numerous ongoing projects incorporated into the Imagebase is the North Lawndale Property Information System. This project employs ArcView Internet Map Server to present land use and property information pertaining to what the site describes as “a poor, predominantly African American neighborhood where the City Design Center has been active in community projects” (CIP, History). From the Map Server one may access aerial views of specific sites within the neighborhood and information on historically significant landmarks. Clicking on a landmark opens a window in the web browser which displays a smaller scale locator map, a block-level site map, a photograph of the landmark, and a digital scan of the Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks-Individual Resource Form. These forms record basic structural and historical information as well as field notes on the landmark’s noteworthy features, relation to streetscape, and rationale for identification as a historical landmark.
The site also aspires to serve as a nodal point within a growing network of related web-based projects both within and external to UIC. According to the Imagebase team, “one of the key aspects of our project is to avoid trying to build a large system on our own and instead to coordinate and piggy back onto the large GIS systems that are currently being developed” (CIP Mission Statement). The Imagebase hopes to forge links with planning agencies and other public institutions who are implementing GIS technologies. Interoperability between archival and informational resources will thus be increasingly incorporated into the structure of the archive itself, and GIS will play a key role in the exchange of information between archives and other agencies which compile digital information.
The varied nature of the Imagebase collection—from photographs and illustrations to maps and geospatial information—lends itself well to a multi-faceted search and analysis apparatus, and this is indicative of the multiple classification systems that are at work. Whereas the Digital Earth concept quite clearly prioritizes a geographic framework and organizes thematic information as a function of that framework, and whereas the DIMTI archives are framed entirely according to themes, wherein geographic information is either self-evidently defined (e.g., historical maps of the Northwest Territory) or apparently inconsequential (e.g., rare illustrated books), the classificatory regime of the Imagebase project is much less rigidly defined. Both thematic and geographic frameworks are employed, and textual queries may refer to either or both at once.
The Chicago Imagebase Project is therefore illustrative of some important issues pertaining to digital archives, namely, the way in which classificatory regimes are employed within them, and to what degree they structure the manner in which information is retrieved, experienced, and understood. It is not necessarily the case that a given body of information with specific characteristics will logically lend itself to a specific classification system. Indeed, the more complex that body of information is, the greater the difficulty in determining what kind of system would most effectively organize it. Classificatory regimes do not simply mirror the information they organize. The same information, organized in different ways, will be understood differently.
Classificatory regimes perform a double movement of disclosure and foreclosure. Since the apprehension of the full range of information contained in an archive is beyond the capacity of human cognition, selectivity must necessarily play a part in knowledge production. The organization of selectivity is precisely the role that classification systems play. But any information that is selectively disclosed is always complemented by information that is foreclosed. Foreclosure is of course never complete, but whether or not information remains undisclosed is in part a function of the amount of flexibility embedded within a classification system. Bowker and Star argue that “we need to consistently explore what is left dark our current classification systems . . . and design classification systems that do not foreclose on rearrangements suggested by new forms of social and natural knowledge” (1999, 321). Digital archives are certain to play a growing role in shaping our understandings of geography and of history. The Digital Earth concept, the Digital Imaging and Media Technology Initiative, and the Chicago Imagebase Project each highlight some of the issues that are at stake, and the last of these in particular is indicative of possible ways to go about remaining open to new forms of social and natural knowledge.
To this point I have attempted to flesh out some of the emerging geographies
of the digital transition. I have argued that thematic and geographic classificatory
regimes inform our experience and understanding of historical and geographical
information, and that the digital transition offers us important opportunities
to reflect upon and rethink this process. Exploring the tension between
archiving the digital and digitizing the archive, as articulated through
the three examples of digital archives examined above, is one way of engaging
with these issues. I have also suggested that at work amidst all of this
is the extension of “old” metaphors—the earth, the map, the filing cabinet—and
their attendant classificatory regimes into “new” realms of digitality.
This presupposes certain relationships between the past and the present
that bear further consideration, and to this end I would now like to throw
the preceding discussion into a somewhat more properly historical relief.
I turn my attention to some of Walter Benjamin’s insights to show that
the contemporary digital transition is borne upon by issues which were
of crucial import during and prior to Benjamin’s time. What will emerge
is a reconsideration of the relationship between history and the present,
and an enriched understanding of the role that digital archives might play
in this reconsideration.
The archive in the age of digital reproduction
Walter Benjamin was a German social theorist who lived from 1892 to 1940. Two of his works in particular, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and the Arcades Project, are of particular relevance to my discussion. As the title of the first of these suggests, Benjamin was fascinated by the effects that mechanical reproduction technologies had upon the work of art, and by the ensuing effects that this process had on broader social understandings and uses of art. “For the first time in world history,” writes Benjamin, “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence upon ritual” (1968, 224). Previously, the work of art inhabited the ritualistic domains of commission and creation, of exchange and ownership. “One may assume,” continues Benjamin, “that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view,” (224) and more specifically, not their being on view in the public domain.
Mass reproduction technologies effected the politicization of art on a mass scale by “permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his [sic] own particular situation” (221). This changes the nature of art, such that, “to an ever greater degree, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (224). A corollary to the reproducibility of a work of art is that the consumption of it is transformed from a ritualistic singularity—as a function of the uniqueness of the work—to a politicized multiplicity. Art, by way of mechanical reproduction, could be enjoyed, utilized, denigrated, or despised by the masses. Insofar as mechanical reproduction democratized the work of art, it suggested for Benjamin the potentially emancipatory power of technology.
The digitization of the archive and the archivization of the digital each manifest the potential that Benjamin describes. In terms of the former, the digital museum exponentially multiplies the opportunities that the work of art, in the form of its digital reproduction, has to meet the beholder or listener in his or her own particular situation. A visitor to the Louvre’s virtual tour (which uses Quicktime to offer its visitors 360 degree views of the actual rooms in the Louvre; http://www.louvre.fr/), the Smithsonian Institution’s on-line collections (http://www.si.edu/), or the DIMTI’s image databases, is but a few keystrokes and mouse-clicks away from viewing art and artifacts ranging from the most famous to the most obscure. In terms of the latter, digital archives of geospatial information emancipate that information from the ritualistic domain of specialists. The E.P.A.’s Envirofacts database and EnviroMapper application (http://www.epa.gov/enviro/), the The Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Geospatial Data Clearinghouse (http://www.fgdc.gov/clearinghouse/), and the Digital Earth concept itself each aspire to this ideal.
We are, without a doubt, amidst an age of digital reproduction—or what Pickles has called the age of mechanical hyper-reproduction—wherein xerox machines, computer printers, and digital scanners, “have the character of resituating and reconfiguring ‘the object’ (the earth, the region, land parcels) in multiple contexts and in ways which call for new theories of maps, landscape, and geography” (286). Benjamin contends that, “the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence” (222). The digital manifestations of libraries, archives, and museums, insofar as they are changing the ways in which we conduct research, learn about the past, enact public policy, or plan our vacations, are indeed changing our mode of existence. The digital transition therefore calls for us to reexamine our geographical and historical perceptions, understandings, and imaginings of the world.
One direction that these reexaminations might take is suggested by Pickles’
observation that, “all mappings (traditional and digital) have the potential
to produce new social relations, but often they hide these relations. As
with the information revolutions of the past, they become fetishes” (1999,
2). Triumphalist ideologies of progress undergird the fetishization of
technology by impenitently valorizing the social relations effected through
technology and by heralding the continuous and inevitable improvement of
the human condition by virtue of technology. In short, technological transformation
can easily become an end in itself rather than a means for realizing human
potential. Benjamin saw the numerous, aging arcades scattered throughout
Europe as symptomatic of the dark side of socio- technological transformation,
and his insights are worth reflecting upon in light of the contemporary
digital transition. At the same time that digital technologies are providing
access to new forms of reading, writing, and thinking about histories and
geographies, they harbor the potential for obscuring social relations that
may diverge from or perhaps even contravene altogether the democratic ideals
with which these technologies are imbued.
Socio-technological transformation and ideologies of progress
When they appeared during the first half of the nineteenth century, Europe’s arcades were monuments to industrial productivity and spectacles of mass consumption. The precursors of modern day shopping malls, arcades stood as the expression of the dreams and wishes of a newly emergent consumer culture. Their quick demise and their transformation into the catacombs of discarded and obsolete commodities seemed to Benjamin to offer profound insights into the inner workings of modernity. He was deeply concerned by the pervasiveness of the idea that the march of history and the technological advances that it witnessed were somehow inevitable. Amidst the thrall of such ideologies of progress, technology became self-legitimating, and its fruits stood self-evidently as valorizations of capital-driven industrial production and mass consumption. Yet technological transformation has a destructive side that remains hidden by ideologies of progress. Gilloch suggests that for Benjamin, “technology and instrumentalism are not indicative of liberation, but are manifestations of a new epoch of illusion, ignorance, and barbarism” (1996, 10). In the spectacle of world expositions, the Hausmann-ization of Paris, and the machinations of bourgeois fashion, Benjamin saw a mythic glorification of progress which glossed over the ongoing violences wrought by technological transformation: the obscuration of class relations, social dislocation and upheaval, the aestheticization of war, and the fetishization of historical progress itself. For Benjamin, modernity is an era notable more for its technological refinement of barbarism than for its enlightenment and civility.
Benjamin’s Arcades Project, unfinished at the time of his death, consists of a massive accumulation of research notes, quotations, historical data, and drafts. His overall project, not only in terms of its content but in its very form as well, was a concerted effort “to root out every trace of ‘development’ from the image of history,” (1999, 845 [H°, 16]) and to develop a “philosophy of history that at all points has overcome the ideology of progress,” (1999, 857 [O°, 5]). Central to this effort was the de-fetishization of technology. For Benjamin, technology possessed the potential to bring about positive restructurings of the social order, but as long as it was fetishized as an end in itself, it could not be utilized to fulfill this potential. Buck-Morss writes, “technology, not yet ‘emancipated,’ is held back by conventional imagination that sees the new only as a continuation of the old which has just now become obsolete” (1989, 115-6). Ideologies of progress portray history as the direct and unbroken antecedent of the present, as a linked chain of events which progresses forward to and culminates in the present day. The fruits of technological “progress” become the fetish objects which valorize both the historical trajectory and its endpoint.
Benjamin contended that technological transformations did not entail unmitigated emancipatory progress but a repetitive movement of creation and destruction. Gilloch writes, “in the ‘Arcades Project,’ Benjamin seeks to trace the archaic and most ancient in the heart of the ultimate site of modernity, to discover the mythic forms and compulsive repetition precisely where progress, enlightenment and novelty proclaim themselves most loudly” (1996, 104). For Benjamin, the “new” did not transcend the “old” but instead depended upon forging links with past forms in order to feign “progress”, thereby obliging the “new” into imitating and repeating “old” forms. According to Buck-Morss, Benjamin noted that, “early photography mimicked painting. The first railroad cars were designed like stage coaches, and the first electric light bulbs were shaped like gas flames. Newly processed iron was used for ornamental rather support purposes, shaped into leaves, or made to resemble wood. Industrially produced utensils were decorated to resemble flowers, fauna, seashells, and Greek and Renaissance antiques,” and the arcades themselves, “resembled Christian churches” (1989, 111).
It is not sufficient, however, to see the past and the present in their various relations to one another. This is precisely how ideologies of progress operate: the topological flux of history is simply linearized into a trajectory that always already leads to, and valorizes, the present. Rather than conceiving of history as a linear progression, Benjamin sought instances where past and present collided in a flash that would rend asunder such simple linearities, and the collisions he sought were to be found in the dialectical image. He writes, “it is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein in what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (1999, 462 [N2a, 3]). Gilloch points to Benjamin’s employment of the principle of montage as a means to awaken the revolutionary potential of the image. According to Gilloch, “his intention in using the montage principle is to startle, to make manifest that which lies hidden and forgotten, to bring the repressed unconscious to consciousness, to awaken the dreaming collectivity so that it might come to realize the content of the dream” (1996, 115). The montage, through its dystemporal juxtapositions, has the potential to disrupt the linear logic of past and present upon which ideologies of progress are founded. In the arcades, Benjamin saw a wellspring of images by which society could be awakened from the dream of progress. In spite of all that they once stood for, the arcades had become an unwitting archive of revolutionary potential.
Benjamin’s insights are of utmost relevance for any consideration of socio-technological transformation. In an era when the destruction of Iraqi targets during the Gulf War is reduced to and transmitted to the masses as a high-tech video game, and advances in biotechnology are touted as the solution to world hunger while issues of underlying social, political, and economic inequalities are ignored, ideologies of progress and the fetishization of technology are as evident today as they were in his time. Crucially, it is not technology per se that perpetuates the barbarism that Benjamin feared, but the passive acceptance of undemocratic uses to which it can be put, and of the mythic shrouds of progress with which it is often clothed. Benjamin argued that “the world expositions were training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value. ‘Look at everything; touch nothing’” (1999, 201 [G16, 6]). As such, writes Buck-Morss, the masses were “taught to derive pleasure from the spectacle alone” (1989, 85). The spectacle of technology for its own sake participates in the obscuration of history as the repetitive process of creation and destruction that Benjamin sought to expose. Despite the numerous beneficial uses that digital archives are intended to be put, there remains an air of spectacle to the “magic carpet ride” that Gore’s account of the Digital Earth describes, or to a virtual tour of the Louvre. Benjamin’s injunction is to refuse to be drawn into the spectacle of technology in spite of its allure.
In the face of this ever-present danger there exist numerous instances
where technology is being used as a means for bettering the human condition.
The City Design Center, which manages the Chicago Imagebase Project, has
embarked upon several initiatives that focus on lower income communities.
The North Lawndale Project mentioned above is one of these, and another,
the Pilsen Project, has integrated GIS technologies with artist’s renderings
of neighborhood design improvements as a means to help bridge communication
gaps between academic specialists and members of the Pilsen community (http://www.evl.uic.edu/sopark/new/RA/).
The Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles project seeks to forestall urban
neighborhood disinvestment by providing information on and working directly
with communities before decline and decay has a chance to set in (http://nkla.sppsr.ucla.edu/).
And the Public Participation GIS movement has open up vital spaces within
which issues of GIS and community are given critical consideration, with
a mind towards formulation of a praxis that is sensitive to “the social,
political, historical, and technological conditions in which GIS both empowers
and marginalizes individuals and communities” (http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/varenius/ppgis/ncgia.html).
Taken together, these efforts are fraught with difficulties, but they point
the way towards constructive and democratic uses of digital geospatial
technologies.
Conclusion
I have attempted in this paper to explore two interrelated questions regarding digital archives: how may they be understood? and how may they be used? As new as the digital archive phenomenon is, these questions have been approached in many ways from many different quarters. My approach has been that of a historical geographer informed by social theory, and I have sought to engage the digital archive concept on historical, political, and epistemological grounds. I argue that it is vital to understand how, through technology, knowledge is constructed and information is represented. This requires an awareness of the epistemological forces that shape the way we understand and use digital information, from the operative metaphors and the classificatory regimes at work, to the ways in which ideologies of progress can effect the fetishization of digital technologies. And this awareness is required not only of those who design and create digital repositories of historical and geographical information, but of anyone who uses this information as well.
I would like to conclude by suggesting that digital archives harbor
in them the potential for subverting ideologies of progress and for resisting
the fetishization of the technologies that enable their existence. Figure
1 is intended to bring together two ages, separated by centuries but remarkably
alike in their imperatives, into a single image. Embedded in each are narratives
of discovery and of conquest, of profound technological innovation and
of vastly uneven social, political, and economic development. Digital technologies
require of us a certain degree of vigilance towards the kinds of histories
and geographies that are emerging in our midst, and an awareness of the
larger history of socio-technological transformation which will inform
our participation in the digital transition in ways that have creative,
democratic, and emancipatory effects within society.
Figure 1. Visualization of global internet traffic flows (Eick,
1999) superimposed upon “The Age of Discovery, 1340-1600” (Shepard, 1923)
using Adobe Photoshop 5.0.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. John Pickles and Dr. Francis Harvey for their
comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as for their “Digital
Space and Places” seminar from which this paper materialized.
Notes
1. Goodchild uses the phrase “digital transition” to describe the broad social and technological changes wrought by “the explosive growth of digital communication that has occurred in the past 30 years” (1999) In his response to Goodchild’s presentation, Pickles cautions us to consider the underlying assumptions of “transition-talk,” namely the presupposition of “a particular conception of History that is progressive and usually singular and linear” (1999). As will become clear in my discussion of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, there are certain dangers lurking within notions of history that cast it as an inevitable and oftentimes self-valorizing progression socio-technological transformation. I use the phrase here with precisely these considerations in mind.
2. I employ the term “classificatory regime” to distinguish thematic
and geographic classification in general from specific classification systems.
Bowker and Star note that, “although it is possible to pull out a single
classification scheme or standard for reference purposes, in reality none
of them stand alone. . . . They are layered, tangled, textured; they interact
to form an ecology as well as a flat set of compatibilities” (1999,
38). While this observation most certainly holds for digital archives—which
entail the interaction of numerous classification systems and standards
as evinced by cataloging procedures, image sizes and formats, programming
languages, Uniform Resource Locators, software and hardware specifications,
etc.—I have chosen to simplify my discussion somewhat to make the point
that the emergent geographies of the “digital transition” are directly
borne upon by the new forms of organizing and classifying information enabled
by digital technologies.
References
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Eick, Stephen G. 1999. “Visualization of Internet Traffic Flows.” Original digital image available at http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/geographic.html
Gilloch, Graeme. 1996. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Goodchild, Michael F. 1998. “What is a Geolibrary?” White Paper, Mapping Science Committee of the National Academy of Sciences “Distributed Geolibraries Workshop,” June 15-16, 1998.
Goodchild, Michael F. 1999. “Cartographic Futures on a Digital Earth.” Keynote Presentation, International Cartographic Association Annual Conference on “Touching the Past, Visualizing the Future," Ottawa, Canada, August 1999.
Gore, Al. 1998. “The Digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21st Century.” http://www.digitalearth.gov/VP19980131.html
Gregory, Derek. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press.
Kahn, Ralph, et. al. 1998. “Digital Earth User Scenario Suggestions.” http://digitalearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/Scenarios199806.htm
Kitchen, Rob. In preparation. “Introducing Cyberspace.” In Mapping Cyberspace, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchen, eds. London: Routledge.
Pickles, John. 1995. “Conclusion: Towards an Economy of Electronic Representation and the Virtual Sign.” In Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographical Information Systems, John Pickles, ed., pp. 283-307. New York: Guilford Press.
Pickles, John. 1999. “Cartography, Digital Transition, and Questions of History.” Invited Response to Michael Goodchild’s Keynote Presentation, “Cartographic Futures on a Digital Earth,” International Cartographic Association Annual Conference on "Touching the Past, Visualizing the Future," Ottawa, Canada, August 1999.
Shepard, William R. 1923. Historical Atlas. Original digital
image available at the University of Texas-Austin Perry-Castañeda
Library Map Collection, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/historical/history_world.html