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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The area told as a story An inquiry into the relationship between verbal and map-based expressions of geographical information Eide, Oyvind Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 This electronic theses or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Title: The area told as a story: An inquiry into the relationship between verbal and map- based expressions of geographical information Author: Oyvind Eide The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ You are free to: Share: to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. The area told as a story An inquiry into the relationship between verbal and map-based expressions of geographical information Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, School of Arts and Humanities, Department of Digital Humanities Øyvind Eide 2012 Abstract In the struggle every creator of expressions goes through, the re- strictions of the media being used are there, to be obeyed or to be questioned. In this thesis I will show how maps and verbal texts are different media, and how these differences have consequences not only for how things are said, but also for what can be said at all using these two media. A text contains too much and too little information to make a map. This means that there are things—for example, negation and disjunction—which can be expressed easily in texts, but which are difficult to put on maps. Further, a map needs a level of specificity in the input data in order to be created. Such specificity is rarely if ever found in texts. In the thesis, experiments are described in which this is studied in detail. Based on the results from these experiments, an inventory of types of information that are incom- patible is presented, along with a discussion of the degree to which each of them is incompatible. Even if the experimental results are based on just one specific text, it is also argued that they are examples of a much more general feature, applicable to most if not all texts. The latter claim is sustained through a study of the literature in the scholarly tradition of comparing different arts and different media. It turns out that the findings from the experiments are in line with traditional as well as recent views in this area. It is explained why this is so, and what consequences this may have for how maps and texts are treated, in academia as well as beyond. 2 Contents Preface 10 Acknowledgements . 11 1 Introduction 14 1.1 Why did they not use maps? . 14 1.2 Why use Schnitler to study geographical texts? . 17 1.3 Outline of the thesis . 21 I Historical context 23 2 Maps and landscapes 24 2.1 Places and maps . 29 2.2 Finding one’s way . 37 2.3 The stage . 48 3 The historical context 49 3.1 Border negotiations . 50 3.2 A short outline of Sami history . 54 3.3 Peter Schnitler: the writer . 58 3.3.1 Family background and education . 60 3.3.2 The war . 63 3.3.3 Trøndelag: from the end of the war to border work . 65 3.3.4 Theoretical education, practical work and knowledge . 66 3.3.5 Truthfulness . 69 3.4 Witnesses: the other voices . 72 3 4 3.4.1 Knowledge of maps among the witnesses . 73 3.4.2 Labyrinths and drums . 75 3.4.3 Place names and joiks . 77 3.4.4 School history and reading skills . 81 3.4.5 Maps and texts: the use of symbolic representations . 86 4 Schnitler’s border protocols 88 4.1 The text creation events . 89 4.2 Text responsibility . 91 4.3 Multi-vocality . 94 4.4 A historian’s view on Schnitler’s credibility . 97 4.5 Conclusion . 99 II Experiments 101 5 Experiment setup and model building 102 5.1 The experimental process . 103 5.1.1 Learning from a model . 104 5.1.2 CIDOC-CRM . 107 5.1.3 Overview of the modelling stages . 111 5.1.4 Stepwise formalisation and fall-off . 112 5.2 Starting point: the text . 116 5.3 Building the primary model . 122 5.3.1 Co-reference . 124 5.3.2 Time and events . 130 5.3.3 What the primary model looks like . 134 5.4 Towards the formal model . 134 5.5 Vector data . 138 5.6 Maps . 140 5.7 Results from the setup processes . 145 5.7.1 Directions . 146 5.7.2 Distances . 148 5.7.3 Coordinate systems . 148 5 6 Case studies 151 6.1 Case 1: Povel Olsen . 151 6.1.1 Paragraph 42735 . 152 6.1.2 Paragraph 42677 . 158 6.1.3 The rest of the paragraphs . 162 6.1.4 Seeing Povel’s statement as a whole . 163 6.1.5 Summing up . 167 6.2 Case 2: Ole Nilsen . 168 6.2.1 Only one . 170 6.2.2 Unknown border . 172 6.2.3 Summing up . 173 6.3 Cases 3–4: Peter Schnitler . 173 6.3.1 Case 3: Aggregation . 174 6.3.2 Case 4: Route description . 179 6.4 Results . 184 6.4.1 What the text has to offer . 185 6.4.2 What a map needs in order to be filled . 186 III Discussion 187 7 Hypothesis and results 188 7.1 Classification of results . 189 7.1.1 Fully specified textual descriptions . 190 7.1.2 Underspecification . 194 7.1.3 Disjunction . 199 7.1.4 Negation . 200 7.1.5 Impossible figures . 201 7.2 Maps can still be made . 203 7.3 The question of context . 206 7.4 Conclusion . 213 8 Beyond Schnitler 214 8.1 The stronger hypothesis . 214 6 8.2 What kind of image is a map? . 216 8.3 Comparing maps to texts . 219 8.4 Comparing the arts . 222 8.5 Media modalities . 233 8.5.1 Material modality . 234 8.5.2 Sensorial modality . 235 8.5.3 Spatiotemporal modality . 236 8.5.4 Semiotic modality . 241 8.5.5 The model as a whole . 242 8.6 Texts and maps . 244 8.7 Is the stronger hypothesis supported? . 253 9 Closing remarks 255 9.1 Maps and texts revisited . 255 9.1.1 Why did they not use maps? . 256 9.1.2 The push towards an inclusive ‘map’ . 258 9.1.3 Ut mappa scribens ..................... 261 9.2 Evaluation of my research method . 265 9.2.1 Does the researcher have to be a programmer? . 266 9.2.2 Writing code? . 268 9.2.3 Does the reader have to be a software user? . 269 9.2.4 The data package . 270 9.3 Further research . 271 9.3.1 Larger maps or “maps” . 272 9.3.2 More evidence . 273 9.3.3 The map as myth . 275 9.4 Final words . 276 Bibliography 278 List of Figures 1.1 Fragment of Schnitler’s map from 1744 . 20 3.1 Example of a joik . 79 5.1 Example of a CIDOC-CRM model . 108 5.2 Graphical representation of points on a map . 113 5.3 An example text taken from S1 .................. 118 5.4 TEI encoding of the example text from figure 5.3 .