Sources, Empathy and Politics in 'history from below'.

This post was commissioned for inclusion in an online symposium on 'history from below' over at the Many Headed Monster, and is best read in conjunction with the other pieces posted there.  I am reposting it here just by way of keeping track of stuff.  

The purpose and form of history writing has been much debated in recent months; with micro-history, and by extension history from below, being roundly condemned by historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage as the self-serving product of a self-obsessed profession.  For Guldi and Armitage the route to power lies in the writing of grand narrative, designed to inform the debates of modern-day policy makers – big history from above.   Their call to arms – The History Manifesto – has met with a mixed reception.  Their use of evidence has been demonstrated to fall short of the highest academic standards, and their attempts to revise that evidence sotto voce has been castigated for its lack of transparency.  

Regardless of the errors made along the way, of more concern to practitioners of ‘history from below’ is Guldi and Armitage’s assumption that in order to influence contemporary debate and policy formation we should abandon beautifully crafted small stories in favour of large narratives that draw the reader through centuries of clashing forces to some ineluctable conclusion about the present.  I have no real argument with the kind of history they advocate – and the success of recent works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital, suggest that it can both do justice to the evidence, and contribute modern policy debate.  And I am sure with a couple of decades’ hard work (there were 19 years between the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and Das Kapital), Guldi and Armitage will produce a book that lives up to the hype.

But, they fundamentally miss-represent the politics of history writing, and of micro-historical analysis in particular.  And what they seem to miss is a simple appreciation of the shock of the old.  The lessons of history are very seldom about ‘how we got here’ with all its teleological assumptions, but more frequently about how we can think clearly about the present, when we cannot escape from it.  

Understanding classical Greek attitudes to sexuality; Tokugawa Japan’s system of governance, or the use of concentration camps in the Boer War is not about grand narrative, but the interrogation of difference.  What the past has given us is an ‘infinite archive’, reflecting a real – if not fully knowable – world.  By interrogating that archive, we are freed to test our assumptions about the present.  In a scientific mode, we might literally test a theory against the evidence; but just as valid, in a humanist mode we can interrogate a word, a phrase and emotion for its meaning.  In either case, history rapidly becomes a tool to think with – testing and probing the past because it allows us to think about the present more carefully.  

For this purpose, for the purpose of thinking with history, the precise topic of historical analysis is secondary, and ‘grand narrative’ is counterproductive.  In part, grand narrative doesn’t work for this purpose because it is inherently teleological, and brings with it ill-digested assumptions about how human society functions.  One need look no further than the facile accounts of empire found in the work of historians like Niall Fergusson to see the pitfalls; or the risible nationalist diatribes of ‘Historians for Britain’ collective.  If you start with a ‘dog in the fight’ – a defence of American ‘empire’; or an anti-EU agenda - your ability to see clearly is at least compromised.

‘History from below’, by contrast appeals to a very different kind of politics; and it is in essence, a politics of empathy and voice explored through a conversation with the dead.  In the British Marxist tradition, it was founded in the creation of a humanist account of the ‘radical tradition’ that gave to every stockinger and handloom weaver an identity and personality.  The politics of this tradition was found in the demand that the reader empathise with individual men and women caught in a whirl of larger historical changes, and it was, and is, a politics of emotion.  The methodologies of ‘history from below’ use detail and empathy to demand of readers a personal engagement with a specific time and place; just as micro-histories uses the contrast between the everyday and the remarkable, to force the readers’ engagement.

And as a political project, both ‘history from below’ and micro-histories have been remarkably successful.  The public politics of the west in the last fifty years have been dominated by forms of the ‘identity’ politics.   These new politics have helped to push aside the twentieth century’s disastrous obsession with nationalisms (the focus of both older grand narratives, and the crutch leant on by historians such as Fergusson and ‘Historians for Britain’).  

We now have detailed and beautiful histories of the experience of the enslaved, of people excluded by race, gender and sexuality; by dis/ability and poverty.  Each of these ‘histories from below’ have evolved in dialogue with contemporary politics, both feeding the activism of modern campaigns, and perhaps more importantly, ensuring that no-one can be dismissed as less feeling, less human, less important, than anyone else.  By changing the focus of historical writing and research, ‘history from below’ has effectively eroded the inherently racist notion of the ‘volk’ in favour of ‘leuten’; has eroded nationalisms in favour of individual experience.

In other words, history from below has been a remarkably successful form of cultural politics (and Politics), that owes its basic success to the creation of an imaginative and empathetic connection between the individuals, past and present.  But to achieve this end, history from below has made a further contribution to both historical scholarship and methodology that places it at the centre of a wider set of developments.

Despite the (over) reliance of historians such as Edward Thompson on government spy reports, and many social historians’ addiction to parliamentary ‘blue books’; history from below demands that we seek alternative pathways to knowing about individuals – that we seek out readings that work self-consciously against the grain and documents that, however fleetingly, record the experience from below.  And herein lies the problem and the opportunity.  Our sources create a fundamental tension between the bureaucratic character of most inherited documentation reflecting experience from below (endless lists and accounts), and the political work of history from below as a project – to create empathy across time and space.  The conundrum becomes, how do we turn a name, perhaps a number, if you are lucky, a single line – in to a human being.

In part, the answer to this quandary has been found in family and community reconstruction; in the creation of relational databases that pull together fragments of information from as wide a body of sources as can be managed.  When, for instance, small fragments of narrative sieved from pauper letters and examinations, are combined with details of pensions lists and the raw biology available through the International Genealogical Index, we come close to being able to create compelling simulacra of the dead.   A shared experience of childbirth, or hunger; of disability or simple poverty, can be enough to bring to the readers’ minds’ eye a fully formed human being – all the details filled in via the readers’ imagination.   

But even these limited details are unavailable for many.  So we also use strategies of detailed contextualisation.  In part, these strategies mimic the forms of fiction – where small details are used to compress a scene to it tightest compass.  In history from below, we might use location and the built environment as ways of giving authority to an event that would otherwise be dull and off-putting – one of a million settlement examinations; one of five hundred shared beds in a workhouse.  All of which simply gets us to the point where the form and genre of writing history from below comes in to direct conflict with the sources we normally use, creating a tension which in turn explains why ‘history from below’ has been both remarkably productive in the creation of new methodologies; and why, more importantly, it creates a need to rethink and remake the genre of history writing more broadly.

In other words, in the face of challenges from advocates of ‘big history from above’ it seems to me that we are confronted with a series of opportunities, created by the very practise of writing history from below; that in turn provide the basis for a fuller political agenda.  We have an answer to the siren calls of ‘big history’.  And the answer demands just a few things.

First, we need to be much more sophisticated in how we theorise the process of writing and presentation.  There is currently no-one seriously unpacking the literary practise of historical writing from below in a way that would allow us to examine it as an object of study in its own right.  And yet, by being more self-conscious in how we construct emotion and engagement through textual practise, we can raise our game substantially – allowing us to recognise (and teach) the different techniques we use; and to categorise varieties of history writing in new ways.  And while no one would want to see too much self-obsessed naval gazing, there is a real opportunity for substantial criticism that would in turn allow us to present ‘history from below’ as a more fully described set of generic conventions.  Not perhaps a ‘science’, but a clear methodological choice.

Second, we need to embrace innovation more fully, and to identify the digital tools that allow us to construct lives and experience from the distributed leavings of the dead.  The world of early modern and nineteenth century Britain, in particular, are newly available to new forms of connection.  Nominal record linkage, building on a generation of work undertaken by family historians, should allow us to tie up and re-conceptualise the stuff of the dead, as lives available to write about.  Or we can revolutionise close reading of text through a radical contextualisation of words.  By allowing every single word or phrase to be mapped against everything written in the year or decade – we could create a form of close reading that makes for powerful history writing.  Or, we could think about contextualisation more imaginatively, by adding a few more dimensions to the context in which we place our objects of study.  Where is the 3D courtroom and church pulpit; where the soundscape and sound model; where the comprehensive weather data that would allow us to write a life, an event, a moment in new and different detail?

 And finally, my belief is that we need to be more explicit about the political work that we think ‘history from below’ is doing.  If we think the work contributes to a modern political conversation, I think we need to say so – not to simply advocate for our own beliefs, but to use the past to think more carefully about the present.  From my perspective, it does not matter over much if the thinking is about gender, poverty, race or disability; but about ensuring that a conversation with the dead forms a part of our conversation about the present.  

When the likes of Jo Guldi and David Armitage, and the ‘Historians for Britain’ group advocate for big history and the longue durée, they are making specific claims about how they can intervene in a modern politics; and effectively denigrating other people’s politics along the way.  It is only by countering these claims, and replacing them with our own more subtle analysis that we can do full justice to the aspirations and labours of our colleagues.  There is a coherent intellectual project in ‘history from below’, that perhaps needs more critical inspection, that perhaps needs more technical innovation, but which nevertheless provides the best opportunity we have to create an inclusive, progressive, empathetic history – a way of thinking clearly with the past.     

Judging a book by its URLs

It will sound odd, but I have recently had a great time editing URLs.  Robert Shoemaker and I have have just finished a book for CUP, derived from the London Lives project, and called - London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690-1800. It is a long book (170,000 words) and each quote and reference in it is linked via a URL to the original document or article, book or web-resource used as evidence or to contextualize the argument.  It will be published as both an ebook and in hard copy, and the links need to be robust, and secure.  My estimate is that there are in the region of 4,000 URLs included in the manuscript (which was written collaboratively in PMWiki).  In the end, I found that I could identify an appropriate link for 98% of all footnote references, but then had to eliminate around 10% of these, as the relevant URL was just not useable.  The book took some nine years, and I am glad it is finished.

One of my final jobs was editing those 4000 URLs.   It took about three months work, spread over the last year, and I have just finished spending a week or so confirming what I hope will be their final form.  When I have told people about this work many have looked incredulous and suggested that this is the sort of technical implementation process that should be left to others.  A couple of otherwise nice people have suggested I dump this job on the shoulders of the nearest PhD student.  But for myself, it is precisely the kind of thing that an author should do for themselves.  And in doing it, two things kept coming to mind.  First was how the role of the scholar in creating a rigorous academic apparatus is a central part of the intellectual journey that academic writing involves - and that we should see the implementation of the online version of this in the light of the precise writing of footnotes and references that mark out good scholarship.  And second, that URLs encode a system of design and intent, online architecture and system of access, that signal the quality and permanence (the academic credibility and perceived audience) of historical materials online.  And that just as we have always sorted and judged scholarship by its form, we should think a bit harder about how the form of a URL can let us interrogate online materials.

On the first point, I do not know of much discussion of the joys of this kind of academic slog.  There is a lot of good writing on research and archives (by Carolyn Steedman and Arlette Farge among many others), on writing and thinking, but no-one talks much about the painstaking labour that goes in to turning a rough draft in to a final finished piece of scholarship.  And here I am really talking about generating accurate and fully comprehensive footnotes that reflect both the material cited, and the research journey that resulted in the main text.   This has become much easier with online catalogs and citation management packages, but nevertheless remains laborious and a reflection of our collective and individual commitment to a particular kind of evidenced discussion.  But for me it also represents my favourite compromise.  The writing of history is a wonderfully imaginative and creative process.  And in some respects we wish to judge the product of history writing as art.  Is it enjoyable to read? Is it convincing?  Does it do the job of good writing in liberating the readers' imagination?  In making these judgements we tend to appeal to a notion of 'value' that is cultural and that privileges dominant forms of authority.  This aspect of judgement is essentially romantic; with all the implications for western and elite hegemony embedded in that idea.  At the same time history writing is the result of simple hard work of a more technical kind - in the archives, in collating and collecting, re-ordering and interrogating data.  And it is valuable because it encompasses that hard work.  The beauty of the academic apparatus is that it evidences this and in the process generates a different measure of value.  In other words it is where quality is tied to a 'labour theory of value'.  I love the academic slog because it is where un-moored judgement is tied down to hard labour; and where value can be universalized in a common human experience (work).  In other words I really enjoyed editing 4000 URLs precisely because in them and their associated footnotes lies a claim to and evidence of the hard labour that underpins the book itself.

 At the same time, the process also taught me to read URLs differently.  Clearly coders and web designers do this as a matter of course.  But I am a historian and want to read URLs as a scholar, rather than as a programmer or designer.  And for me, the important thing is that URLs embed the structure of a site, making it plain to see for anyone willing to look hard; and that they are made up of both the character of a library reference, and a command directed at the new technology of discovery - the Internet .  There are just lots of different types of URL.

There are 'Search URLs' that include all the elements that  take the user past a collection to a specific object, but don't let you go directly there without the query.  And there are URLs that encode a cataloging hierarchy.  There are URLs that sift data, or work in your browser to change the data delivered, highlighting phrases or sifting material.  And there are URLs that encode licensing, passwords, and access information.  It is easy enough to find that the whole search journey that took you from a library catalog to an individual item is encoded directly in the URL, and even personalized to you, the machine you are using, or the forms of access you can deploy.  It is easy to find URLs that run on for hundreds of characters, each element divided by a '&' or a '%', or such.

But in creating robust reproducible links to credible historical materials most of these URLs are at least problematic if not useless.  If they include details for institutional access, or session information, they cannot be re-used by someone else.  These URLs are friable and fragile things and not fit for scholarly purposes.  And as a result, for the London Lives book we have been forced to eliminate all the links we originally hoped to include to forty or fifty different sites.  To take a single example, most archives structure their online collections with search in mind, making it difficult to link to a single item.  I spent a lot of time finding the catalog entry for every manuscript we cited in the London Metropolitan Archives, and Westminster Archives Centre, only to regretfully strip out the links when confronted by a complex URL that just did not look credible as a long term citation of the item itself.

Even in its simplest, and in the form recommended by the site for sharing a link, a London Metropolitan Archives URL looks like this:

http://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail/REFD+P69~2FBRI~2FB~2F001~2FMS06554~2F004?SESSIONSEARCH


Since we had consulted these items in their physical form in any case, it did not seem too problematic to leave out these links, but a shame nevertheless.  And likewise, with paywall material there seemed little point in dangling real access, and the promise of credible evidence, before the eyes of readers who would not be able to go beyond the login screen.  It seemed better to cite a specific item in combination with a general (unlinked) URL and date of consultation as reflecting our own research journey, rather than to promise access when we could not deliver it.

With few exceptions the URLs that have been retained (and there are still 4000 of them) address specific items with a specific ID, and usually run to 20 to 40 characters.  DOIs are not bad once you figure out their structure and reformulate them as they should be, rather than the way they are normally cited on journal web pages.

dx.doi.org/10.1353/sec.2010.0268

And Google Books creates a very nice URL once you strip out all the complex formatting instructions that are normally generated as part of a search and inserted after the main ID.  This is what a Google Books' URL looks like if you were to use the 'search' version:

 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1sMJGt7_rTAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Prosecution+and+Punishment:+Petty+Crime+and+the+Law%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rrzGUq_aDsSy7Aa_9YGQCg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22Prosecution%20and%20Punishment%3A%20Petty%20Crime%20and%20the%20Law%22&f=false

And this URL will take to the same book:

 books.google.co.uk/books?id=1sMJGt7_rTAC

 And the Eighteenth-century Short Title Catalog generates some of the most elegant URLs I have found:

estc.bl.uk/T174945

And to a lesser extent, so does the Ethos collection of doctoral theses at the British Library.

ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.354762

And London Lives and the Old Bailey Online do pretty well on this score:

www.londonlives.org/browse.jsp?div=LMSMPS501980014
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?ref=t17910413-19


In part, I suspect that these issues would all disappear if I had a better sense of the layer of structure that lies beneath the WWW.  But for the moment I am keen to have a short, human-readable URL that looks like it will last longer than the session I am currently logged on for.   All of which simply takes me back to the joy of academic slogging and the importance of the academic apparatus as something that evidences hard work and opens up scholarship to credible criticism that goes beyond simple romantic appreciation and prejudice.

I know all too well that one of the skills of an academic is the ability to judge a book by its cover and the form of the text it contains.   For the online we need to embed URLs into precisely this process - and the joy of all that editing was that at the end of it, I feel I have learned to do just that.

Place and the Politics of the Past

Preface

The talk that forms the basis for this post was written for the annual Gerald Aylmer seminar run by the Royal Historical Society and the National Archives, and was delivered on 29 February 2012.  The day was given over to a series of great projects, most of which came out of historical geography, and I was charged with providing a capstone to the event, and presenting a more general overview of the relationship between history and geography.  There was a good audience of academics, archivists and librarians, all with a strong digital cast of mind and I very much enjoyed it.  Unusually, I am also pretty sure I still agree with the majority of it even some six months after I sat down to write it.  At the same time, I have put off posting it until now because it just did not quite feel like a blog post - too much history, too much text, too much of an internal discussion among academics.   I have also recently found myself wary of blogging, having discovered (who knew?) that blogs form a sort of publication that people occasionally read.  But, the work of people like Andrew Prescott has also reminded me of just how important it is to continue having the discussion.   In the nature of a public talk, the text is rather informal, the notations slapdash, and the links non-existent.

Place and the Intellectual Politics of the Past

Currently there is a rather wonderful raproachment between historical geographers and historians; with archivists and librarians (as usual) providing the meat, gristle and spicy practical critique. This is brilliant.  These are cognate disciplines which need to be in constant dialogue.  The habits of mind and analytical tools of geographers need to inform our understanding of the past; while the mental ticks of the historian, and the authority of history as a literary genre, are necessary tools for communicating all kinds of memory to a wider audience.

Frustratingly, over the last half century, this cross-fertilisation hasn’t always flourished.  Geography Departments (and even historical geographers) have not done a lot of talking to history departments, and vice versa.  Many geographers, through the 70s and 80s, in particular, became ever more engrossed in the technical manifestations of their field; while many historians have fallen for the joys of the linguistic turn.

In part, this has been about funding and the structures of higher education.  In the great taxonomy of knowledge inherent in the creation of the notion of STEM subjects vs the Humanities, Geographers naturally gravitated towards the areas with more secure funding.  While historians, frustrated by the changing politics of their field – the collapse of ‘modernity’ as a form of historical explanation (both right looking and left looking) – pursued theory, gender and language, to the exclusion of positivist measurable change – they chose places of endless debate and disagreement – usually in the form of a various versions of identity politics - as a route to a politicised audience.  Similarly, whereas historical geographers looked to Europe and a thriving institutional base; historians tended to more frequently look westward to North America, where historical geography is almost unknown – or at least denied the security of an extensive network of independent academic departments.

 All of which is simply to say, that we are confronted with two fields that should be in constant dialogue, but which simply have not passed much more than the odd civil word in the last few decades.  In the process, they have developed different technologies of knowing and different systems of training and analysis.  It strikes me that an event celebrating Gerald Aylmer’s cross genre engagement with history and archives, with the structures of the archive, and the stories that can be told with them, is just the right place to bring these disciplines back onto the same map, or at least to reconsider where in a rapidly changing technical environment, that necessary dialogue might take place.

 

 Of course, for most of the last decade or so we have had the ‘spatial turn’ in history; and for longer than that, the creation of a post-modern geography.  Historians have struggled to define ‘space’ and context in ever more material (if still rather flabby) terms; while some historical geographers have taken theories of discourse and language seriously and extended them to the clear air enclosed by the mind-forged boundaries symbolically represented on every map.

 

 But this has been little more than a casual rapprochement – driven largely by academic fashion; and has not fundamentally changed the centre ground of either discipline. Most historians still trade in text mediated by uncertainty and theory; while historical geographers, strive to tie data to a knowable and certain fragment of the world’s surface.

 

What I want to suggest today, is that something rather more profound than the ‘spatial turn’  is also happening in the background, and that it promises to force these disciplines (and several others) back into a more direct relationship.  

 

And this change, this possibility, is being driven by technology; both in the form of the ‘infinite archive’ – the Western Text Archive second edition; and also through the direct public access to a newly usable online version of GIS-like tools, in the form of Google Maps and its many imitators. 

To deal with historians and the infinite archive first - I don’t think that historians have quite twigged it yet – though librarians and archivists certainly have - but the rise of the ‘infinite archive’ has fundamentally changed the nature of text.  It has turned text in to ‘data’, with profound implications for how we read it, and deploy it as evidence.  My guestimate is that between fifty and sixty per cent of all non-serial publications in English produced between Caxton and 1923 – between the first English press and Mickey Mouse – has been digitised to one standard or another; with a smaller percentage of serial materials thrown in.

 This has ensured that the standard of scholarship has in many ways improved.  It is now possible to consult a wider body of literature before setting out to analyse it.  But, it has also pushed us to the point where it is no longer feasible to read all the material you might want to consult in a classic immersive fashion.  Instead we are moving towards what Franco Moretti has dubbed ‘distant reading’, and towards the development of new methodologies for ‘text mining’ – or the statistical analysis of large bodies of text/data.  Stephen Ramsay’s new book, Reading Machines, illustrates four or five examples of what he describes as a new form of ‘Algorythmic Literary Criticism’, but is simply a taster for a wider series of practical methodologies.  That Tony Grafton, president of the American Historical Association could recently and hyperbolically claim that textmining was simply the ‘future’ of history, and that it was already here; reflects a truth most digital humanists (whose ranks are dominated by librarians and archivists) have been struggling with for the last three or four years; but which most historians are only now becoming aware of.

 The Google Ngram viewer, which allows you to rapidly chart the changing use of words and phrases as a percentage of the total published per year is just the most high-profile online tool in a wider technological landscape.  The associated, and ill-named, ‘culturomics’ movement being built on the back of the ngram viewer is another.  I love the ngram viewer, and spend my Sundays charting the changing use of dirty words decade by decade.  But it also forms the basis for a newly statistical approach to language.  And lest we forget, recorded language is the only evidence most historians use.

 

I am not entirely  convinced by the culturomics work, which focuses on describing social and linguistic change through consistent mathematical formulae, but in related studies by people such as Ben Schmidt, Tim Sherratt and Rob Newman, one can find the beginnings of a pioneering analysis of large scale texts that promise to remodel how we understand cultural change, and the relative influence of events.  

These graphs simply illustrate that the word ‘outside’ both grew in commonality over the course of the nineteenth century (perhaps understandably as people’s lives migrated inside); and that if this phenomenon were a reflection of naturally evolving language (embedded in people’s vocabulary in youth), its adoption according to the age of the authors whose work has been published, would look like the first graph; but that in fact it looks like the second.  In other words, these visualisations created by Schmidt suggest a history of the adoption of the use of the word ‘outside’ in response to events; and in the process give us a way of measuring the cultural impact of specific happenings – its import as measured by individual responses to them.

 

Or look at Tim Sherratt’s visualisations of the use of the terms ‘Great War’ and ‘First World War’ in 20^th century Australian newspapers.  While entirely commonsensical, the detailed results of the 1940s in particular mark out the evidence for a month by month reaction to events; allowing both more directed immersive reading (drilling down to the finest detail), and a secure characterisation of large scale collections.

 

Or to bring this back to a British perspective, we can look at work Bill Turkell and I have done on the Old Bailey Online – simply charting the distribution of the 125 million words reported in 197,000 trials, to analyse both the nature of the Old Bailey Proceedings as a publication, and their relationship to words spoken in court – in this instance to illustrate, among a few other things, that serious crimes like killing were more fully reported than others in the 18^th century proceedings, and that this pattern changed in the 19^th century.

 

This stuff works and is important; and will necessarily form a standard component of the research of anyone who claims to understand the past through reading.  

But it points up a further issue.  If each paragraph in the infinite archive, all the trillions of words, is simply a collection of data, it immediately becomes something that can be tied to a series of other things – to any other bit of data.  A name, a date, a selection of words, or a phrase, or most importantly in this context, a place – defined as a polygon on the surface of the earth.  In other words, the texts that form the basis for western history can now be geo-referenced and tied directly to a historical/geographical understanding of spatial distribution, which can in turn be cross analysed with any other series of measures of text – textmining makes text available for embedding within a geographical frame.  

I can’t emphasise this enough: the creation of a digital edition of the western print archive means that it can be collated against all the other datasets we possess.  The technology of words, and how we engage with them, has changed; creating a new world of analysis.  With a bit of Natural Language Processing, and XML tagging; and a shed load of careful work, a component of text that hitherto has been restricted to human understanding becomes subject to precise definition: “he walked for twenty minutes from St Paul’s westward, coming first to Covent Garden, and then onwards to Trafalgar Square’, changes from a complex narrative statement reflecting an individual’s experience, into three individual locations, a journey’s route, and a rate of travel; each capable of being expressed as a polygon, a line, a formulae – a specific bit of translatable data.

What I want to say next might not sound quite right in this context.  But, I am hoping this development of text as data, and by extension, text tied to place, will have a more profound impact on our understanding of the past precisely because, for the most part, it has not emerged from historical geography.  It has been driven by people interested first in text, and only then, in data such as place. 

 As a long-time admirer of the work of historical geographers, and avid reader of it; I believe that the rise of a highly sophisticated form of desktop GIS, requiring substantial training and expertise to make work, has contributed to the evolution of a widening gap between disciplines, and has in some ways distanced historical geographers from the kind of audience historians have traditionally courted.   The rise of the geographer as ‘expert’ has been both impressive and excluding.

 But, in the last few years a real alternative has emerged.  I understand geographers are sniffy about it, and I know full well that it doesn’t provide the kind of powerful analytical environment that a fully functioning GIS Editor, Analyst and Viewer package can generate in combination with a Spatial database management system.  But it is usable and it is continually getting better.  And I mean Open Street Map, Google Earth and Google maps, and the range of open source browser side services that build on it, like BatchGeo.

Together they make available to everyone, a good and growing proportion of the tools previously only available to a technocratic elite.  In the process and in combination with the transition of text in to data; we are suddenly in a position to do something different.

 My favourite exploration of what can actually be done online in an intuitive and accessible way, is Richard Rodger’s collaborative project with the National Library of Scotland: Visualising Urban Geographies, and the associated Addressing History sites:

 

The important thing about these projects is that they allow a wider audience to use historical maps in the way a historical geographer would, and to upload their own KLM files, and to explore the data, and relate it to a modern map.  It is historical geography made user friendly.  And that is important.

 

I am also a great fan of the New York Public Library Labs, Map Rectifyer Project, which crowd sources the kind of warping of maps that people just could not previously do. 

 

And more recently, the British Library’s adaptation of the same methodology to their own map collections.

As much as anything projects like these educate a wider public (including historians) about the methodologies and issues traditionally faced by historical geographers, and generally hidden behind a beautifully presented set of final maps designed to make a point, rather than to allow an intellectual journey.  These sites form open invitations to discover all the issues associated with the underlying maps and all the problems with the data. 

 

Together, text as data and user friendly GIS make it newly possible to imagine an environment in which geographical information, and display, form a natural and unproblematic component of every other analytical process.  It makes possible a situation in which historians cease to be mere text merchants, obsessed with the perfect quote, and compelling (if largely un-evidenced) argument; and where geographers have a new access to the subtle mappings of the marks of ‘culture’ in its broadest sense – a new way of thinking about the geographical distribution of behaviours and ideas, that bring within a geographical fold questions traditionally preserved for others.  

By extension, In other words, I want to suggest that it is very much the moment for a bonfire of the disciplines, and that while history and geography can now begin to speak in new terms, the same forces are also making it possible for literature, and art history; for all the disciplines of memory and explanation, to speak in new ways to each other.  We quite suddenly share a new culture of data – and data can be translated.

I will return to both these developments in a minute.  But, by way of illustrating the kinds of things that we are now able to do as a result of this newly open and analytical framework – through the mash-up of text and space - I want to spend a little time discussing a project that Bob Shoemaker, Matthew Davies and I, and a large team of other people, recently completed, called Locating London’s Past.  Please excuse me for spending the next couple of minutes on something that sounds a little bit too much like ‘me and my database’ to be entirely appropriate.  

 

In itself, Locating London’s Past is not particularly important, but it illustrates one naïve  attempt to play with these new possibilities; to take text/data and accessible online GIS, and make something that facilitates mapping words.    

This project grew from the rich soil that is failure.  Five or six years ago, as a final component of the original Old Bailey project, we struggled to incorporate a mapping feature on to the site that could be delivered online.  But in the last few years, we realised something was changing; and inspired in particular by the Edinburgh project, we decided to try again.  The outcome - Locating London’s Past –  does three things that are new.  First, it makes available a fully rasterised and warped version of both John Rocque’s 1746 map of London; and the first ‘accurate’ OS map of the capital created between 1869 and 1880 – both of which have been fully ‘polygonised’, and related to a modern Google maps representation of London.  And second it brings together around 40 million words of text, and a raft of established datasets – a couple of hundred million lines of data - in a newly geo-coded form that can be ‘mapped’ against both area and local population, at the level of streets, parishes and wards.  And finally, it relates both these resources to the first comprehensive, parish level population estimates for the 18^th century.  

In the process it brings together text and maps in a new way, delivered in a cut down Google maps container that even a historian can understand.  For the maps and GIS, we turned to Peter Rauxloh of the Museum of London Archaeological Service (MOLA), who worked with  scans and an index of place names drawn from Rocque’s map created by Patrick Mannix, to develop the kind of resource that underpins the best sort of traditional desk bound GIS project.  

The 24 sheets of the original map were turned in to a single image, and then warped onto the first reliable Ordinance Survey map from 1869-1880, creating a direct geo-referenced relationship between the first accurate modern representation of London and Rocque’s eighteenth-century version.

Rocque 1746 After Georeferencing. 

The geo-referencing operation involved identifying some 48 common points between Rocque's original map and a modern OS map; leaving us the task of defining all the streets, courts, parishes and wards that made up 18^th century London.  In the end, this amounted to some 29,000 separate defined polygons. 

 

Parish boundaries which intersect with the street of Cheapside, London.

 

Completed street network for main area covered by Rocque's map.

Street lines expanded to polygons based on recorded width.

 

All of which gave us something rather cool – a proper, interactive and accurate map of 18^th century London, that among a lot else, let’s you go from here:

 

To here:

 

And more importantly, lets you go here – all those parishes securely defined: 

 

And all those streets and cul-de-sacs:

 

In the process it makes, each parish and street, ward and cul-de-sac newly available as an analytical category – defined as a specific area, and location – defined in terms of its distance from any other place, and the route between them, its size and importance in a hierarchy of streets – and defined securely against the earth’s surface.

All of which left us with just one more task – the, to us, more familiar job of providing the text/data to put into these analytical polygons.

And for that, we brought in the material available from the Old Bailey online for the 18^th century crime, from London Lives, fire insurance records, voting records for Westminster, Hearth Tax returns and plague deaths; and finally a bunch of archaeological material from Mola.   

Along with the more structured data, we ended up with a couple of hundred million words of text, primarily reflecting crime and events – descriptions of behaviours given under oath to magistrates, in court, at sessions and before a coroner; which we then processed using a combination of automated methodologies, including Natural Language Processing, and manual checking, to identify some 4.9 million place-name instances, each tied to its own polygon.

All of this data was then made available for search and mapping – including both structured and keyword searches – so both the ability to search on the crime of ‘murder’, and the word: teapot.

 

Inevitably, there are problems with the data and the map; but, it nevertheless allows us to map things like the number of small houses in the 1690s – defined as having one or two hearths as recorded in the Hearth Tax Returns.

Or more contentiously, to map the distribution of suicide cases in the coroners’ inquests found by a keyword search of 5000 inquests on ‘felo’ – as in felo de se – and ‘suicide:

 

Or the distribution of the mention of a horse, mare or gelding, in the Old Bailey.

 

We have not even begun to explore what the data tells us, nor was this created in the expectation that we would be able to do so – but the important thing is that it does allow us and everyone else, to explore this material in a new way – and do so quickly enough to facilitate the testing of new hypotheses, and random midnight thoughts.  And to quickly test words against spaces, text/data against spatial data.

Of course, all of this is contentious, and I suspect will leave historical geographers rather dissatisfied.  The original data is variable, the percentage securely geo-referenced is inconsistent and I am waiting for a few proper demographers to critique the population figures.  As worrying, the data is not currently available for the more subtle analytical approaches that have been so fruitful in historical geography.  We can’t easily define networks, for instance.   In other words, this is a rough starting point, and all the critical skills of a true sceptic are needed when using it.  But this site does allow us to play with all this data in a new way, and to come up with insights and hypotheses for further investigation.  To, for instance, map all the instances of the words for the industrial colours of  ‘blue, red and yellow’ against the natural hues of ‘brown and green’ to explore an urban environment and to suggest different ways of thinking about a wider cityscape.

 

 

 

 

It also means that we have 40 million words of geo-referenced text that we can use as the basis for a new kind of text mining – that incorporates space with linguistic change; and which will add to the geographers’ toolbox all the rather wonderful methodologies of corpus linguistics: Measures of Text Frequency and Topic Modelling to name just two.

We are, of course, nowhere near where we really want to be.  For that, we will need to have a lot more text, and a lot more subtlety.  I want to be able to map all the places in a newspaper by subject and category of article – to have a scrolling representation of places mentioned in a text as I read (either immersively or distantly).  I want to be able to use corpus linguistics, semantic search and syntactic analysis (ontologies and all the methodologies designed for text/data) in combination with both secure place name data, and historically sensitive boundary and population data.  There is not much point in comparing 18^th century text with the modern road network or county boundaries; or wondering why there is not a lot of text coming from Greenland in the absence of population density figures.  I want to be able to map networks defined by individuals, defined in turn by the words they use; and networks defined by geographical measures such as road width.  What percentage of London was made up of parkland at different stages?  And what words and crimes are dominant in those different parks (Hyde Park vs Moorfields?).  And as importantly, I want to be able to test the results against secure measures of statistical significance.

All of the components to make this happen are in place – we all now work with data and data is interchangeable – subject to unending automated translation - making the main technical hurdle essentially unproblematic.  But there is still a long way to go.  And there is also a clear and present danger in the process.  And it is that danger, that I now want to turn to.

I spent last year co-directing one geographical project – Locating London’s Past - and one text mining project – Datamining with Criminal Intent.   Both projects were intellectually engaging beyond measure.  I learned more about history – and sources I already thought I knew well - doing something else with them, than I could possibly have done in a year of reading.  But I also found myself struggling against the run of the data I was helping to produce.  I came to count myself among those who Lewis Mumford had in mind in 1962 when he warned urban geographers that: 

‘… minds unduly fascinated by computers carefully confine themselves to asking only the kind of question that computers can answer and are completely negligent of the human contents  or the human results.’  Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line "Mother Jacobs Home Remedies",” The New Yorker, December 1, 1962, p. 148

In other words, I found myself limping uncomfortably towards a positivist abstraction in which there were few people, but much data; beautiful graphs and compelling trends, but few of the moments of empathetic engagement that make history so powerful and which form a little discussed component of its authority as a genre of literature.

So, at this point, having waxed on the joys of technology and what it allows you to do, I want to stand back for a minute and remember the individual in the landscape.  And in this instance, just one individual – a man named Charles McGee or Mckay, who stood just here for over forty years, from at least 1809, until his death in 1854; making a living as a one-eyed crossing sweeper – a black Jamaican refugee from Britain’s wars of colonial expansion:

 

Or to put it differently, he stood just here, on a map created just before he arrived:

 

Or, for a map that should have included him, here:

Or if we want to get down to street level, just here – the obelisk he stood in front of, itself visible on the map:

 

MacKay became a part of the image of this cityscape almost immediately.  William Bennet was the first to record his presence, placing him before the obelisk dedicated to John Wilkes that stood at the top of New Bridge Street:

 

He was already missing one eye, but had not yet started sporting his shock of white hair:

 

A year later, in 1810, he McKay was still there:

As he was when Ackerman published the same vista in 1812.  Recognisable, even though his faced has been scratched white by some later owner of this image, clearly made uncomfortable by his presence in the landscape:

 

Five years later, in 1817, John Thomas Smith, the keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, gave us our first detailed portrait, and our first biography.

 

Smith claims Mckay, or McGee as he styles him, was already old beyond credibility in 1817, though another account would put his age as 50 in that year.  His hair ‘almost white’, was tied back in a tail and Smith firmly locates him at his ‘stand… at the Obelisk, at the foot of Ludgate-Hill’.  He also claims (as do most commentaries on well known street figures), that he was secretly wealthy; and that he attended Rowland Hill’s Methodist Tabernacle on Sundays; that he was lately seen wearing a ‘smart coat’ the gift of a city pastry chef, and finally that his portrait, made in October of 1815, hung in the Twelve Bells public house on Fleet Street – around the corner from the obelisk.

Two years later, George Cruickshank, includes him, broom in hand, with Billy Waters, King George III, and a host of abolitionists, in the ‘The new Union-Club’.
 

And again, in 1821, in his depiction of Tom and Jerry, ‘Masquerading it among the Cadgers’:

 

And finally, in the same year, Cruickshank includes McKay in his ‘Slap at Slop’, suggesting along the way that McKay was involved on the edges of radical London:

And so to John Dempsey’s portrait from sometime in the 1820s – which seems to me to speak of a man and a place, of a life lived in a landscape, more powerfully than any other.

 

At the beginning of the next decade, he was still there, depicted this time, from a different perspective:

 

And three years later, Mackay also became the model upon which Charles Matthews based his depiction of a modern Othello in ‘the Moor of Fleet Street’,  first performed to disastrous reviews, at the Adelphi in 1833.

 

 In the play, Mackay is depicted as engaged in a battle of jealousy and rage among the low characters of London; and is described as ‘the Moor who for many a day hath swept Waithman’s crossing over the way’ from Ludgate Hill.[i]   His spotted red bandana, clearly visible in Dempsy’s depiction, invested with gypsy lore, and gypsy power, to ‘keep woman honest, or cure the worst cold’, and given a history steeped in London’s boxing lore, and serving in the play, the role of Desdemona’s lost handkerchief. 

 The best account of his later life is from Charles Diprose’s authoritative history of St Clement Danes, where McKay lived, off Stanhope Street.  Diprose  describes McKay as ‘a short, thick-set man, with his white-grey hair carefully brushed up into a toupee, the fashion of his youth; … he was found in his shop, as he called his crossing, in all weathers, and was invariably civil. At night, after he … swept mud over his crossing… he carried round a basket of nuts and fruit to places of public entertainment...’  And according to Diprose, ‘He died in Chapel Court, St Giles, in 1854, in his eighty-seventh year.’  A later historian, William Purdie Treloar claims McKay was then replaced at his stand by a drunken soldier who ‘sometimes made 8s to 10s a day’, and drank as much each evening.

All of which is simply to say, that some people stand in the same place longer than many buildings; and have a greater right to appear on a map, than many landmarks.  As we move towards that new data rich environment of text/data and intuitive GIS; as naïve historians and the wider public, come to use the ideologically laden genre that is a map as an interface for trillions of words of text; and as they step back from their own text to view text/data from afar, I just think it is important to remember that landscapes and cityscapes only exist between the ears of their denizens – that we cannot map the subtleties of Ludgate Hill and New Bridge Street without trying to know Charles Mackay.  With Lewis Mumford, we need to ensure that we are not ‘completely negligent of the human contents or the human results’ of asking the questions only computers can answer.

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[i] Note that Waithman is a wealthy linen draper with a shop on Fleet Street.  His daughter is reputed to have been especially kind to McKay, and to have received a legacy from his on his death of £7000.  Treloar gives a more detailed account of Waithman’s role as alderman and MP, and suggests his daughter regularly took out soup and warm food to McKay, p.124.

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