Cartogram of the 2008 US Presidential Election results

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In: Bill Rankin
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On Friday, December 4, The University of Pittsburgh’s Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age was joined by Bill Rankin, an Associate Professor of the History of Science at Yale University. Professor Rankin’s research focuses on the relationship between science and mapping, the environmental sciences and technology, architecture and urbanism, in addition to methodological problems of digital scholarship, spatial history, and geographic analysis. His prize-winning first book, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016. Professor Rankin is also an award-winning cartographer, and his maps have been published and exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Rankin talked with the Sawyer Seminar Participants, who are faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University, about cartography, election mapping, and the contemporary U.S. political landscape. Amid the many reactions to and characterizations of the historic 2020 Presidential election, this meeting helped the Seminar participants understand how and why election mapping continues to play an increasingly crucial role in the electoral process; in particular, Rankin’s talk touched generatively about the concept of “purple states” or “purple places.” Purple has been, in recent years, offered as a more representative complication to the simple binarism of “blue,” or liberal, and “red,” or conservative states. The “red” versus “blue” state discourse began as a simple, visual way for newscasters to characterize a state’s partisan tendencies over long durations of time. And while we do Read More

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In: Matthew Lincoln
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On February 7th, one of the Seminar’s very own participants headed our lunchtime discussion; Dr. Matthew Lincoln, a research software engineer at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, talked with us about museum informatics, archive management, and computational approaches to humanities projects. Although his transition to software engineer is relatively recent, his experience with data modelling and analysis is definitely not—before his move to Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Lincoln earned a Ph.D. in art history from University of Maryland, where he used computational methods to study 16th-18th century Dutch printmakers. This, along with his work on data engineering at the Getty Research Institute’s Getty Provenance Index Databases, makes him uniquely attuned to multiple aspects of building data sets and archiving. As Dr. Lincoln himself articulated during his talk, using large data sets as a Ph.D. candidate—what he worded as the “available technology”—alerted him to particular data absences within library and museum holdings; in other words, researchers can only carry out the large-scale digital projects that data actually exist for. If you’ve ever searched for an eBook only to find that a digital version of this text does not (yet) exist, you know this feeling; it is, on a smaller scale, the same feeling a researcher might have if they, for example, wanted to compare one particular library system’s entire collection to another—but there is no usable data with which to do such a project. The project idea is there, the necessary data is not. This is where and why Dr. Lincoln’s job becomes so essential; his work has helped Read More

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In: Sandra González-Bailón
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“What’s going on behind the analogies”– Sandra González-Bailón Outcomes are not always intentional. We trigger anticipated and unforeseen things with our actions. The “invisible hand” is consequential, known only through its effects. Like contagion processes, our actions are enmeshed in interrelated networks. These are some of the metaphors discussed by Sandra González-Bailón in her research on metaphorical thinking, social processes, and communication structures. She engages head-on with the challenges and affordances of digital realities- using data to learn about or “decode” aspects of social life. “Analogies help make creative connections; but they can also draw pictures of the world that are too coarse-grained for any useful purpose.” (29, Decoding the Social World) Polar area diagram by Florence Nightingale published in Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army and sent to Queen Victoria in 1858.  Models and metaphors are helpful for human cognition and communication, it seems unlikely that they can (or should) be avoided. The role of metaphors and other modes of abstraction are sorts of “black boxes” that are convenient for communication. We humans think with them, but they do shape our view of reality. “The language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or rhetorical; it is literal. We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way — and we act according to the way we conceive of things.” (pg. 5, Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By) Perhaps other metaphors might be more productive — other models may work better than their forerunners. Read More

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In: Matthew Edney
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A version of our world where we are not dependent moment-by-moment on GPS tracking and Location Services is quickly becoming more and more unimaginable. So it was fascinating, then, that in his September 5th and 6th talks—delivered as part of Information Ecosystems: A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh—Matthew Edney asked that audience members think critically about these various mapping services and how deeply reliant we have become on them as a source of supposed “truth.” Long before GPS—and even long before TomTom, if you’re old enough to remember those—Edney pointed out that mapping and the so-called “field” of cartography has fundamentally shaped our conceptions of the world: how we visualize and are capable of visualizing it, how we are able to move and think about moving around it, and the many iterations of land-as-property documented over many centuries of maps. Edney’s new book, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, does an excellent job of providing readers with a timeline of then-to-now. Cartography utilizes an impressively apt epilogue to the “Introduction”: “there is no such thing as cartography, and this is a book about it.” He helpfully framed his talks with this same quotation. By “there is no such thing as cartography,” he explained, he means that what cartography as a “field” purports to be is too loosely defined, too widely varying, too steeped in political motivation to cohere as a truly organized area of thought and practice; to quote Edney again, “the ideal of cartography is the entire belief system, while cartography Read More