Despite the intimidating name, for most effects a Geographical Information System is simply a database that can be visualized as a map, or a map where each feature connects to a series of attributes. In that sense, they combine the suspicions aroused both by maps and by databases as technologies of power that have been at the service of surveillance, colonialism, and the reification of social experience.14 In some quarters, the rise of GIS technologies has been seen as a return to the most naïve and reactionary forms and ideologies of geography. The high cost of acquiring GIS software, training and data means that, besides being open to the same critique as mapping in general, in most cases digital cartography remains a tool of the privileged and powerful. It has emerged as an instrument of technocracy and social control, while critical geographers looked elsewhere for alternative ways to represent space. However, to refuse to use a method because it has been aligned with a hegemonic world view is to renounce the possibility of appropriating it for other ends. The same reductive processes that make geo-databases so suspect also create tools for communication and collaboration. The formal restrictions imposed by Euclidean geo-coding (where place is a point with coordinates, not a notion or a memory) provide a carrier signal; if our maps then speak the hegemonic language,
13 Gregory and Ell, Historical GIS, p. 118; Jeffrey Klenotic, ‘Putting Cinema History on the Map:
Using GIS to Explore the Spatiality of Cinema’, in Explorations in New Cinema History, ed. by Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers, pp. 58-84 (pp. 59-61).
14 Massey, For Space, p. 106.
this at least makes them widely readable. In historical research, after all, cartography is one of several tools, not an end in itself.
In a geo-database model, the map is only one of the interfaces through which the user can view, edit, and analyse the underlying data tables. It is not, however, a decorative addition; working with and through maps has an impact on the kinds of operations and hypotheses one is drawn to try. In the first place, it facilitates the approaches suggested by spatially-aware theory and historiography, asking questions about centre-periphery relationships, trade networks, and
demographics, for instance. These questions pre-date GIS methods, and there are other ways of seeking answers, but the actual, practical work with digital maps has four characteristics that make it particularly suitable: it gives the same importance to each point, it handles changes of scale, it is iterative, and it provides a point of connection to other materials.
If the ‘new cinema history’ is concerned with decentring the historian’s perspective, and engaging with the diversity of cinematic practices outside the metropolis, the ‘flatness’ of digital maps, where each item can be represented by an identical dot, becomes an asset. By making all places look the same (a dot on a map) GIS can encourage the researcher to look at them again and to see all of them rather than the ones known to be ‘important’. In this sense, it foregrounds the multiplicity made possible by spatial separation, according to Massey. Interesting findings can emerge at the local level, or an intriguing pattern be revealed on a broader view.
These spheres of discovery can then be kept in tension through a dialectics of zooming – going from the general pattern to the particular case with more detailed archival stories, and vice versa. Those archival gems that are so rewarding for the
researcher’s imagination can be seen in context, so that it becomes easier to tell whether this was a typical or exceptional case. This is standard historiographical practice, but it becomes a concrete procedure on a digital map. The ease with which the data can be sorted and visualised in different ways encourages an experimental approach: many modest hypotheses can be tested instantly, and the questions can be refined in a feedback loop that keeps the research questions open. Finally, the use of location data can facilitate the use of other sources and categories of analysis relating to the social and geographical context, using the growing amount of data currently available in those areas.
This research project, for instance, would have been impossible without the availability of Ordnance Survey data, through the Edina Digimap service. The 1:50,000 Gazetteer was used as the basic tool to locate towns on the map, and for finer placement of some cinemas (in the four main cities) historical maps were used.15 Census data tables were obtained from the Historical Data Service and connected to a boundary map representing the Scottish parishes as they existed in 1890, while burgh population was connected to gazetteer points.16 In those cases where boundary changes seemed to present a problem, where longer population series were useful, or where historical descriptions of economic activity were informative, the Great Britain Historical GIS portal, developed at the University of
15 EDiNA Digimap Collections,< http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/> [viewed Feb 25th 2012]
16 Data table ‘Parish level statistics arranged by family and sex for Scotland taken from the 1911 census’, data input by the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at the Queen’s University of Belfast, downloaded from the Contemporary and Historical Census Collections (CHCC) at the History Data Service <http://hds.essex.ac.uk/history/data/chcc.asp> [accessed 20 October 2009].
The boundary map, a SHP file of Scottish Civil Parishes 1890 (digitised from Black’s Atlas), was downloaded from UKBORDERS <http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/> [accessed 20 October 2009].
Portsmouth, proved invaluable.17 A very useful website and a 1912 geo-referenced map provided by the National Library of Scotland allowed me to dispense with the need to map railway routes, a very considerable task that has already been
undertaken, in a more comprehensive way, by a Cambridge team.18
The ability to access and incorporate material generated by other research projects, and to make my own data available to others, is a strong motivation for the use of geo-databases. Thousands of internet users interact daily with ‘mash-up’
maps, in which layers of user-generated content can be plotted over basic map layouts. The popularity of digital cartography has fostered an environment in which a project like this one becomes achievable within the limits of a PhD, by adopting similar methods but with properly referenced and consistent sources and a more critical stance. Without access to already-digitised maps and demographics the task would be too onerous, and without the popularization of digital mapping, the skills required to foray into cartography would be forbidding for a non-specialist.
Furthermore, the growth of open-source mapping software is removing some of the costs associated with geo-database development. Work for this thesis was initiated on the ArcGIS platform, a major software package for which the University pays a hefty license fee. Along the way, however, other possibilities became available, and the project was finalised using mostly an open-source package, Quantum GIS,
17 Great Britain Historical GIS <http://www.gbhgis.org/> [accessed 25 February 2012]. A vision of Britain through time <http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/> [accessed 2 July 2012].
18 A History of Britain’s Railways is a website maintained by Ewan Crawford which provides interactive diagrams of all Scottish rail lines with their dates of opening and closure. Although the data cannot be downloaded, it is an excellent reference resource. <http://www.railbrit.co.uk/>
[ accessed 25 February 2012]. The Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge has produced GIS maps of the development of railways as part of the ESRC-funded project on The Occupational Structure of Nineteenth-Century Britain
(http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/occupations/britain19c/, [accessed 25 February 2012].
which provided better connectivity to the project database and had no licensing costs.19 This software allowed me to integrate Ordnance Survey data, scanned map images, census data tables, and my own database using geographical coordinates as the principal independent variable, and also allowed me to export parts of the dataset as printed maps or online interactive mash-ups.
For all their practical advantages, it is necessary to be critical of this friction-free incorporation of certain ideologies of space into everyday life, and even more in academic research. The accretion of layers that constitutes GIS representation can be subject to Doreen Massey’s critique of the postcolonial metaphor of the map as palimpsest, which she rejects for its political implications:
[T]his is to imagine the space being mapped – which is a space as one simultaneity – as the product of superimposed horizontal structures rather than full contemporaneous coexistence and becoming.20
Massey is here drawing attention to issues of change and continuity that inform some of the questions of this thesis. The past is part of the present through its persistence in space. The previous uses of the sites of cinema exhibition, for instance, continue to be relevant to the reception of moving pictures and to their social standing. As long as the simplifications they perform are kept in mind, I argue that maps provide a useful counterpoint to narrative history by drawing attention to the continuity of these localised differences. Primary sources, more
19 Quantum GIS is a project supported by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.
<http://www.qgis.org/>, <http://www.osgeo.org/> [accessed 25 February 2012]
20 Massey, For Space, p. 110.
often than not, refer to moments of change: when a building license was given, when companies were created, when a cinema opened. Maps can complement these sources with insights on what did not change or changed more slowly, highlighting the asynchrony of historical processes.
On the other hand, the practical and ideological problems of the representation of time in cartography (both digital and analogue) are known to historical geographers. The static nature of most maps means that they can only represent a slice of ‘frozen’ time, collapsing into false simultaneity a series of processes and activities. A case in point is Robert Allen’s response to an article in which Ben Singer challenged Allen’s description of Manhattan nickelodeons as less exclusively working-class than previously thought. In the response, Allen argued that ‘mapping [the nickelodeons] upon a street map of Manhattan’, as Singer had done, ‘[does not] enable us to know whether there were qualitative differences between theatres in different or the same neighborhoods’, as they are all ‘reduced to identical dots on a map’. A more worrying ‘flattening’ occurs because Singer condenses the data from 24 months into a single map, and thus ‘the icons
representing theatre addresses are spatially represented as copresent, whereas in fact many of them were temporally sequential’.21
My own attempt to negotiate these limitations resulted in a research design that reflects the changing temporal patterns of the phenomena. The data concerning itinerant exhibition constituted a longer time series. Evidence from newspapers and archival sources about the activities of travelling exhibitors was registered with a place and date, and the resulting maps tend to show the diachronic reach of these
21 Robert C. Allen, ‘Manhattan Myopia; Or, Oh! Iowa!’, Cinema Journal 35.3 (1996), 75-103 (p. 77).
activities. On the other hand, the analysis of programming patterns in fixed-site cinemas was structured around two time-slices: data were gathered for one single day in two different years, so that the synchronic representation of the map reflects the nature of the evidence. By fixing the time variable, it was possible to gather a broader range of data from a greater number of places.
Some degree of simplification is inevitable when dealing with complex historical processes in a way that aims to be systematic. While a printed map is often a static bird’s eye view that is radically distanced from lived experience, digital mapping technologies can offer ways to include more qualitative dimensions, and to minimize the costs of entering and altering information so that mapping can become a more open-ended process. This relies on their existence as a dataset of unlimited richness, which is not restricted by the bi-dimensional conventions of a map. Furthermore, the connection between maps and databases can be an answer to the question of how to handle both multiplicity and interrelationship.