EXPLORING THE SPATIAL NAVIGATION METAPHOR IN DEEP MAPPING.pdf

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ENVISIONING DEEP MAPS: EXPLORING THE SPATIAL
NAVIGATION METAPHOR IN DEEP MAPPING
KATIE OXX, ALLAN BRIMICOMBE AND JOHNATHAN RUSH
Abstract
The spatial turn within the humanities and need for data richness has
led to the re-conceptualisation and exploration of maps as ‘deep maps.’ Building
narratives of place is becoming increasingly contingent on data landscapes as
opposed to the physical landscapes within which they are situated. To make
the assumption that GIS can form the basis for deep maps is to privilege the
spatial dimension (and spatial data) over all others. We have sought in our
experimentation to take a more open, balanced approach as to how a deep
map might be organised as a way of learning/reflecting on what elements a
framework should contain. Our subject matter here necessitated attention to
the challenges and potentialities of deep mapping ‘things deemed religious.’ We
found spatial navigation to be useful for visualizing physical and metaphysical
linkages, integrating the geographical portions of our spatial narrative as well
as organizing thoughts off the map.
introduction
As a case study in deep mapping, we chose to focus on one church in
Indianapolis with a long history: the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church of
Indianapolis. The parish had moved twice over the course of its hundred and
two years, and an interesting spatial dynamics was immediately evident.
1
Prezi
software provided a starting point that allowed us to suggest how multimedia
data and resources could be visualized and interrogated in the hopes of making
a spatial discovery. In the following sections, we will explain the origins of
International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing
7.1-2 (2013): 201–227
DOI: 10.3366/ijhac.2013.0090
© Edinburgh University Press 2013
www.euppublishing.com/ijhac
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Katie Oxx, Allan Brimicombe, Johnathan Rush
deep mapping and its appropriateness for exploring such a complex subject. We
review the relevant literature in GIS and spatial theory. Middle sections will
describe the framework and design of the prototype and its content relative to
the study of religion. Lastly, we discuss future features and opportunities this
case study made evident. We begin with background on Orthodox Christianity
in America and brief history of Holy Trinity Church.
orthodoxy in america
The ‘Eastern’ or Catholic Orthodox Church – one of the two main branches of
Orthodox Christianity – emerged from a myriad of tensions that developed over
the course of the first millennium of Christianity.
2
Eastern Orthodox churches
today are in full communion with one another though under the separate
jurisdiction of one of the four historical patriarchates (Constantinople, Antioch,
Alexandria or Jerusalem) or one of 11 autocephalous, or independently-governed
churches.
3
All Orthodox comprise about 12 per cent of the worldwide Christian
population; Catholics nearly half, and the tens of thousands of Protestant
denominations total about 37 per cent.
4
The first Orthodox Christians in the US were Russians who came into Alaska
in the 1790s. Growth was very slow through the nineteenth century; only three
parishes were founded prior to 1874.
5
Between 1820 and 1990 however, 700,000
Greek immigrants, nearly all Orthodox, arrived in the United States.
6
Like other
Orthodox, their community was small through the early nineteenth century. In
1864 though, the first Greek Orthodox parish was founded in New Orleans, and
by 30 years later their first permanent congregation was established in New York
City.
7
Twentieth-century tensions caused the first lasting divisions in the American
Greek Orthodox community. In 1908, jurisdiction over Greek Orthodox in the
US was granted to the Holy Synod of Greece. In 1922, the North American
parishes, which by then totaled 141, were formally organized by Ecumenical
Patriarch Meletios who re-established Constantinopalitan control over Greek
Orthodox. The American Archbishop Athenagoras followed his superior’s lead
and refused to return the church to Greek control, as some ‘Royalists’ partisans
demanded. The Holy Synod appointed a new Archbishop (or ‘exarch’) for
the United States and the Royalists, in turn, founded autocephalous American
churches.
8
In the United States today the total population of first, second, and third
generation Greeks is nearly 500,000, which is also about half of all Orthodox
Christians.
9
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese is also the largest denomination
of Eastern Orthodox churches in America.
10
As of the 1990 census, Greek
Americans were largely – nearly 90 per cent – urban, although a suburbanization
trend has been evident since the 1960s.
11
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Envisioning Deep Maps
Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church of Indianapolis traces its origins to
1903 when three Greek immigrant men and an Orthodox priest began to meet
at 27 South Meridian Street. The community was incorporated by Indiana in
1910, and four years later they moved to 213 North West Street with space
for both a sanctuary and clerical residence. In 1919 they relocated to 231
North West Street where they built a permanent brick structure for the growing
community. Holy Trinity left this central urban location for a suburb north of
downtown in 1959, where the community resided for half a century. The parish
left Indianapolis altogether in 2008 and moved to Carmel, Indiana. Located to
the immediate north of the I-495 beltway around the city, Carmel is markedly
distinct from it, even taking into consideration the extensive sprawl and ‘edge
city’ characteristics of the greater metropolitan region. Hamilton County, for
example, of which Carmel is a part, is the most affluent of Marion County’s six
contiguous counties.
12
Today, about 500 families belong to Holy Trinity, and the
parish is under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Detroit. Numerous para-
church organizations attest to the varied population there and the vibrancy of the
community.
13
from map to deep map
We are familiar with maps as cartographic products that show the spatial
juxtaposition of features within a landscape. They are probably the most effective
means of doing so.
14
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have not only
revolutionised the production of maps but greatly expanded the scope for
thematic (data) maps. Web-based delivery of maps (e.g. Google Maps) have
further popularised the digital map and has in turn led to location-based services
(such as ‘SatNavs,’ or in-car satellite navigation systems) which aim to deliver
data and information tailored to the location and context of a mobile user.
15
Furthermore, mobile technologies (such as smartphones) have liberated and
democratised the production of spatial data, breaking away from the monopolies
of government mapping agencies. Thus increasingly crowd-sourced data are
freely available through the creative commons (e.g. openstreetmap.org).
16
GIS
have also proved versatile in working interoperably with other techniques and
technologies such as clustering and artificial neural networks (spatial data
mining),
17
cellular automata and agent-based modeling (geosimulation),
18
and
environmental simulation models
19
to create a geocomputational approach to
research.
20
This has contributed to the broader agenda of computational social
science.
21
Mapping application programming interfaces (APIs) have even been
included within computer-aided qualitative analysis systems (CAQDAS) such as
Atlas/ti for the visualization and analysis of mobile interviews.
Despite their versatility, GIS have been criticised for their positivist,
reductionist approach to spatial phenomena and their lack of criticality.
22
It is
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Katie Oxx, Allan Brimicombe, Johnathan Rush
also widely recognised that their ability to handle the temporal dimension and
facilitate spatio-temporal analysis is limited.
23
As such the uptake of GIS has
not been widespread in the humanities and some areas of the social sciences,
even within branches of geography. But this is a technological issue and has not
precluded disciplines having a ‘spatial turn’ irrespective of modern approaches
to handling and analyzing spatial data. The spatial turn in the humanities was
influenced by Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Soja, and
David Harvey.
24
According to Phil Ethington, ‘All human action
takes
and
makes
place. The past is the set of places made by human action. History is a
map of these places.’
25
The notion of ‘place’ is itself fluid. Places are spaces
that are endowed with human experience, are thus subjectively perceived – one
person’s place can be another person’s
terra incognita.
Places may not even be
concrete but symbolic and dreamt though nevertheless anchored to landscape.
26
Thus to unlock a deeper rendering of a unique place and time within broader
contextual narratives requires the
n-dimensional
richness of data and content that
current technologies are able to deliver but which require integration, co-analysis
and visualisation.
27
Building narratives of places is becoming increasingly
contingent on data landscapes as opposed to the physical landscapes within
which they are situated.
The spatial turn within the humanities and need for data richness has lead to
the re-conceptualisation and exploration of maps as ‘deep maps.’
28
The term was
first brought into wider use by Heat-Moon as a way of conflating everything one
might want to say about a place, from memory to identity and culture.
29
Fishkin
sees deep maps as palimpsests constructed through collaborative working on
open access digital archives.
30
The concept of deep maps is predominantly seen
as a way of constructing spatio-historical narratives of events that addresses
some scholarly issue taking into account the contingencies and affordances of
space and place. Events—planned, spontaneous, transformative, disastrous—
are central for the construction of significant narratives. Traditionally these
have been place-based, can be place-making or indeed place-eradicating. An
‘evental geography’ has recently been proposed by Shaw as a conceptual
framework with which to study the ‘endless number of events [that] continue
to shock, surprise and devastate the inhabitants that dwell on this Earth. . . ’
31
But the notion of an event as necessarily having some epicentric geographical
locality is being challenged by ubiquitous communication technologies where
riots to regime change are stoked and orchestrated in cyberspace by ‘smart
mobs.’
32
Evidencing rich narratives of events in a scholarly way requires diverse
data types. Deep maps should thus be able to accommodate quantitative
and qualitative data, spatial data, images, video, audio (voice, music), and
virtual representations of places (contemporary, historical, archaeological) and
artefacts. But to be a mere repository of data achieves little, particularly as
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Envisioning Deep Maps
the exploration, synthesis, argument and interpretation of a narrative requires
processes of discovery/surprise, ranging, data augmentation (temporal and
geographical extent as well as granularity), corroboration/triangulation, tracing
and retracing, making connections, and the organisation of a narrative’s
evidence-base. Perhaps above all, a deep map needs to be internally subversive;
it can challenge what we think we know. Thus deep maps should also provide
the means to harvest, interrogate, analyze and visualize data. They should also
be open to collaborative working. This is perhaps a tall order; it raises the issue
though that a deep map is part product (the evidence-base of an evental narrative)
but also a methodology, a way of approaching and handling evidence.
A deep map requires a space-time framework on which to hang the
methodology. In the majority of writings that address this issue there is
the assumption that conventional object-based GIS will form the basis of
the framework.
33
Indeed there has been some experimentation in using GIS
for the analysis of ‘geo-narratives.’
34
But to surmise that GIS can form the
basis for deep maps is to privilege the spatial dimension (and spatial data)
over all others. We have sought in our experimentation to take a more open,
balanced approach as to how a deep map might be organised as a way of
learning/reflecting on what elements a framework should contain.
deep mapping and religious studies
As Ann Taves has elucidated, religious studies often requires an inherently
spatial approach; scholars move back and forth between emic or ‘engaged’
positions and etic or ‘detached’ ones relative to their inquiries.
35
It is no surprise
then, that scholarship in the field is rapidly emerging and provocative.
36
It
informed our efforts considerably.
Scholarship on Greek Orthodoxy in America is relatively modest.
37
Some
recent works however, either incorporate a spatial perspective or easily lend
themselves to such an analysis. Tavros Constantinou has a significant amount
of work on demographics of Greek Americans and geography.
38
Allen Noble,
Susan Hardwick, and Stephen Daniels and others examine the effect of
immigration and ethnicity on the American landscape.
39
Essays in Anton
Vrame’s text explore the development and function of the parish, a no longer
always geographically-defined entity, and investigate potentially spatial topics
like church outreach, education, and the creation of communal space.
40
Other recent publications on Orthodoxy explore the spatial component
of icons, an area of scholarship rich with potential for spatial theorists
and deep mapping religion. Here another work by Vrame,
The Educating
Icon,
is invaluable (especially for a scholar new to their study).
41
Clemena
Antonova, Martin Kemp, and Beat Brenk analyze the idea of presence and how
icons dwell in space and time; essays in Sharon Gerstel, primarily from an
205

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