David J. Bodenhamer
- The map evoked memories in the form of explanations about wether and why this neighborhood or that place had the character ascribed to it. (97)
- Stories took life in the map (98)
- People experienced the power of the map to evoke history and memory, to prompt narrative, to define community (99)
- GIS (limitaciones): The GIS could not capture the rich associations people had with these spaces, associations based on memories that provided meaning and transformed space into place. (99)
- The power of place to define who we are, both individually and culturally. What is authentic about us, our very identity, is inextricably bound up with the places we claim as our own. (99)
- Concepts of space bind history, culture, and memory as much as they do attributes of a physical world.
- Time was more than our agent, it was our master. Space was the unexamined landscape on which time played out its game.
- Our work as humanists centers on ideas of movement and encounter, on what happens in the spaces between cultures, on processes of transculturation, and on how differently separate cultures perceive thw worlds they inhabit (100)
- New tech have both facilitated and burdended this (re)discovery of space. The power of GIS lies in its ability to integrate data from a common space, regardless of its format, and to visualize the results in combinations of transparent layers on a map of the geography shared by data. We can keep evidence of different types in relationship with each other by virtue of their common location, it also helps us develop multiple views of the data.
- GIS until recently has had only limited ability to move us beyond a map of geographical space into a richer, more evocative world of imagery based on history and memory. (101)
- Over the past few years, GIScientists have made advances in spatial multi-media, in GIS-enabled web services, geo-visualization, cyber geography and virtual reality.
- GIS may hold the most potential for helping us advance our understanding of place and memory, for at least two reasons: it maps information, thus employing a format and a metaphor with which humanists are conversant; and it generates and visualized information, making it possible to see the complexity we find in society and culture. (102)
- Can we use this powerful technology to move beyond its highly structured Cartesian world to one richly textured with histories, memories and experiences that define the places where we live? (103)
- 3D world allows users to walk through buildings that no longer exist. / This constructed memory of a lost space helps us recapture a sense of place.
- How do we make memory dynamic and vital within heritage and culture?
- The primary evidence we use in each instance –documentos, images, maps, material objects– represent personal and cultural memories that serve as mediators between us and the worlds they represent. / We have not used this capabilities to enable our understanding of memory to be as dynamic as the act of remembering itself, and it is to this end that we must direct technology if it is to help us open the past to the multiple perspectives and contingencies we know existed in the past. (104)
- communal memory becomes highly contested public space.
- How then do we attempt to recover the unrecoverable and find our way through memory to the past? inform the present more fully with the artifacts of social memory, the evidence of recall from various times and various perspectives (104-105)
- Methods of saying about a place: oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, images, natural history…
- Deep maps: they are multi-media and multilayered. They involve negotiation between insiders and outsiders, experts and contributors, over what is represented and how. Framed as a conversation and not a statement, deep maps are inherently unstable, continually unfolding and changing in response to new data, new perspectives, new insights (105)
- GIS can help us create a landscape of memory.
- A GIS-facilitated landscape of memory may ultimately make its contribution y embracing a new, reflexive epistemology that integrates the multiple voices, views and memories of our past and allowing them to be seen and examined at various scales.
- Permit the past to be as dynamic and contingent as the present.