Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)

ArcGIS in action. (click to enlarge)

[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital humanists to move past prose to include other forms of analysis (maps, in this specific example), geographers have a different approach to the post-prose moment, one steeped in skepticism over the value of visual representations of data. Are geographers scaredy cats? Or might digital humanists be overexuberant? Or some combination of neither?]

Aside from the “reflexive vs. positivist” opposition in Martyn Jessop‘s talk at the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research and his similar article in Literary and Linguistic Computing (discussed briefly here), the opposition that caught me most off-guard in Jessop’s article was one that was reasserted a few times at Geoinst:

there are fundamental issues concerning the status and function of images in humanities scholarship, this includes the images produced by digital visualization tools. Humanists are used to expressing themselves, and assessing the work of others, through the medium of prose. There is a belief that the visual cannot be as rigorous as the written. It is seen, as, at best, a supplement to the written word and stands in a subordinate position.

Jessop continues to explain how images in “modern educational texts” tend to be merely distractions to break up the flow of the text as opposed to being an integral part of the argument. There are “very few instances where the visual is treated on an equal pedagogical footing with the written.”

This line of reasoning from Jessop’s article continued in his talk, and Anne Kelly Knowles referred to it as well, explaining that history tends to be verbal, whereas geography tends to be visual, setting up the situation in history where the text is privileged over the map, which requires more critical response.

Now it is certainly not the case that the humanities value the textual over the visual as objects of study. I know a few art historians, musicologists, and students of film who would spit milk over their keyboards upon reading an assertion like that online. But it feels true to say that, as a mode of scholarship, the prose work lays claim to the most prestigious form of knowledge creation in academe.

From my reading of the dizzying Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 at UCLA, I get the sense that this tension is a relatively well-investigated and argued one within the digital humanities.¹ Part of the appeal of DH, it seems, is precisely attacking the primacy of prose as the form good scholarship should take, which is reflected in the value given the curatorial (as opposed to the straight analytical). As the UCLA manifesto asserts,

[W]e are advocating for a neo- or post-print model where print becomes embedded within a multiplicity of media practices and forms of knowledge production… Digital Humanists recognize curation as a central feature of the future of the Humanities disciplines… Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds… All of which is to say that we consider curation on a par with traditional narrative scholarship.²

What’s interesting here, to me, is the interest of the digital humanities to move toward the visual precisely when geography is having its own crises, especially among critical geographers, regarding the visual. The visual is attached to the “scopic regime,” an “ocularcentrism” derived from Descartes, who posited “an epistemological standpoint of early modernity that subscribed to the notion of a detached, objective observer capable of a ‘god’s eye‘ view of the world.” Barney Warf here is drawing a history of geography’s relationship with “capital accumulation [and] the rise of the nation-state,” a relationship helped by the illusion of the “certainty of visual knowledge.”

As the visual arts came to be dominated by linear perspective, so, too, did geography come to be dominated by the idea of homogenous, infinite, Newtonian space containing interlocked nation-states or other rigidly bounded entities, within the metaphor of the surface. “The rise of logical positivism in the late nineteenth century,” Warf continues, “added a aura of scientism to this view, mathematicizing it with the disciplines concerned with space such as geography and urban planning in the forms of isotropic planes, surface in which the distribution of social features is evenly distributed.” This scopic regime continued in geography, more or less, until the critical geographers began to break away from it and the quantitative revolution in the 1970s.³

But it is not the case that the critical geographers are asserting for “more prose” in their work. Instead, they were looking for ways to get out from the empirical burden, which, as Soja remarks, though producing “significant and useful factual knowledge about the objective, real world,” had a “tendency to fixate on materialized surface appearances and directly measurable patterning, creating an illusion of opaqueness that could block deeper understanding of the causal forces underpinning these surface expressions.” These “idealized visions of the world” led to a “luminous search for deep structures of causality as the imagined took precedence over the real.”

Soja himself, one of the fiercest proponents of a larger role of spatial thinking in attempts to understand the world, does not argue for “more maps / less prose” but for merely an approach that treats the spatial as an equal party in the trialectic of spatiality-historicality-sociality. In fact, it seems that it is the reliance on the visual that gives geography its static and synchronic sense, a rigidity (in comparison to history’s richness and dialecticity) that Michel Foucault suspects is the result of Henri Bergson.⁴

I bring up this brief history of geography since it shows how the emergence of GIS can be seen (and is often seen) as a reaction to the work of the critical geographers. Soja calls it a “defensive disciplinary response.” “Over the past ten years,” he continues, “the positivist and descriptive core of geographical analysis has refortified its centrality, sustained in part by large flows of financial support for the advancement of Geographical Information Systems (GIS).” The apparent intellectual offspring of the quantitative revolution in geography, “today GIS,” as Marianna Pavlovskaya explains in a 2006 article in Environment and Planning A, “sustains an industry worth $6 billion a year… and remains a corporate and state-sponsored technology widely used for profit making and control.” If GIS was not so appealing as a means of state and capital control, it wouldn’t be getting the funding it is today, especially in contrast with critical geography.⁵

GeoDa, now available for Mac and Linux! (click to enlarge)

But Pavlovskaya’s article does not to simply criticize GIS: she explains that the reception of GIS as the latest guise of state-control/positivism is misguided, and that, in fact, GIS is beginning to be used as a qualitative method, that is, one of the methods that has “become an accepted strategy for those advocating nonpositivist knowledge production and aspiring for emancipatory change.” GIS, Pavlovskaya argues, gives the illusion of precision and exactness, which subsequently gives the illusion of quantitative analysis. But putting something in a database doesn’t guarantee accuracy, just like relying on fieldnotes doesn’t guarantee sloppiness. Furthermore, computers don’t guarantee logic: one can behave illogically with them and logically without them. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches involve interpretive efforts at pattern detecting, at reading textual fields.

Next, and on this point I’m not sure I stand with Pavlovskaya, it’s not the case that the math used in GIS analysis is actually complex enough to qualify as “quantitative” or even “statistical.” A lot of it is, at its root, just counting or not notably different from regular human interaction with space. She writes,

In truth, most spatial techniques available in GIS are only marginally ‘quantitative’ despite being very illuminating. Using simple math (such as distance measurements or calculations between raster layers), they require spatial imagination skills (such as buffering or overlay) and logical thinking (such as combining layers in site selection of multicriteria evaluation). As such, these core functions replicate human spatial thinking about places and phenomena that is common to all geographic research. Overall, spatial analysis in GIS today is largely qualitative, visual, and intuitive despite its insistent labeling as a quantitative method.

She further offers that even cutting edge “quantitative” work in GIS using AI or Bayesian probability is just an “attempt to replicate human reasoning.” In my mere year’s worth of GIS training, we definitely started feeding legitimate statistical beasts, doing spatial regressions and clustering calculations. These don’t replicate human reasoning–in fact, they exist precisely to slow down human reasoning, which is often terrible at detecting randomness, or the lack thereof. Pavlovskaya certainly isn’t asserting that all GIS is qualitative, of course, but I know that, in my work, I felt like I was eating at the kid’s table until I started being able to attach p-values.⁶ This is my own bias, though, that I’ll unpack another day.

Pavlovskaya does approach the leading question of this post head on, however, in terms of visualization–the image over/with the text. Data visualization is what GIS’s core strength seems to be, as GIS can output maps quickly and efficiently, with both quantitative or qualitative data. She points to Mei-Po Kwan’s work on irrational responses to data visualization to argue that it’s “the most telling example of nonquantitative functionality in GIS.” The visualization is, in fact, quite the alluring song that attracts people–myself included–to GIS. If part of our charge, as digital humanists, is to move past prose, to visualize our data, the satisfaction of GIS is really right up our alley. And it’s easy to get striking results: “Visualization is so powerful a technique that often the manipulation of data within GIS does not go beyond querying the data and displaying the results.” Feed in a spreadsheet of census data, dial up a chloropleth, export to .jpg, and move on.

This is a bit flip, but I think it’s important to assert it. Visualization shouldn’t be an end in itself, and engagement with and understanding the tool of visualization deserves the highest priority. Pavlovskaya warns about how maps are tools of control. Maps over-assert their reliability by relying on a metaphor in the mind of the viewer in which space is scientific and exact, so, as a result, maps are true. Here I cue, again, of course, Mark Monmonier, who warns in his epilogue about using a map with the “dual role of both informing and impressing its audience.” After all, “a flashy map… touts its author’s sense of innovation, and cartographic window dressing in a doctoral dissertation… suggests that the work is scholarly or scientific.” With GIS, we have the added authority of having a computer that’s making the map, so the stink of truthiness clings even more formidably to the embedded .jpg.

Warf closes his own article on networks with a bomb detonated in the ocularcentrist modernist’s favorite street-corner café. Vision’s attachment to truth “is essentially a positivist assumption that denies the possibility of other ways of understanding the world.” Mobilizing Richard Rorty, he finishes by declaring that “once we abandon the positivist metaphor of the mirror as the basis of objective knowledge, we are led to the metaphor of the conversation, in which language, positionally, and dialogue are central.” Strangely, to me, this sounds like, in part, a call for less image-based analysis and more dialogue-based thinking, which gets recreated in prose.

I plan on not introducing any more new sources from here on in, so a recap is in order: there is a move to advance past prose-based scholarship in the digital humanities. This means curating various kinds of objects, this means incorporating non-prose forms of analysis (like maps) and data visualizations in general.

Visualization, however, is an approach to data that, along with its current big-budget exponent, GIS, is attached to quantitative analysis, and, hence, to forms of state and corporate control, power relations that move in direct opposition to projects in the digital humanities that are interested in the empowering capability of digital humanistic scholarship. Furthermore, visualization as an end to itself is still wrapped up in questions of power and control that, in my reading of the UCLA Manifesto, remain unaddressed, pushed aside to make room for unrelated emancipatory rhetoric.

On the other hand, GIS itself has not managed to live up to the hype surrounding it as a quantitative tool. In fact, the revolutionaries in the qualitative world can exploit its power for their own purposes.

But is quantitative work necessarily bad? Can’t there be a quant/qual matrix that people like? This is probably a terribly boring discussion that’s been had at every social sciences get together where there are as many bottles of wine as graduate students, but it’s still new to me.

I find it interesting, for example, that the UCLA manifesto separates quantitative and qualitative into historical moments–a sort of political/developmental timeline that Marx might be proud of:

The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character. It harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the Humanities’ core methodological strengths: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation.

Now there’s a lot in this snippet that I think is very, very wrong (or, at least, getting carried away in the rhetoric of the manifesto).⁷ But it does pitch the digital humanities in a similar historical narrative as that of critical geography. Quantitative geography, however, has not disappeared, so we can’t talk of geography in waves as much as in branches. And considering the fantasy of the quantitative promise of GIS (which, pace Pavlovskaya, I still have), being encouraged to incorporate it into my digital humanities work certainly doesn’t seem like a full on, earnest effort to be, also, “qualitative” and “emotive.”

So I end with two messes on the table for starters: the political/control nature of visualization is unaddressed in relation to the pressure/encouragement to visualize and the role of quantitative work in digital humanities seems to earn the feeling of being old-fashioned or compartmentalized within a larger qualitative framework, at least within the framework of the UCLA manifesto.

Conveniently, I’m walking away from these messes, citing a lack of space on this page to continue. But I do have a feeling I’ll be returning to the UCLA manifesto soon enough. The tension over visualization, though, seems like it might be too complex for me right now.

1. I’m new around here, remember. [↩]
2. “Narrative scholarship” here, I think, means “prose scholarship,” not scholarship of narratives. But I’m not positive. [↩]
3. Soja on the quantitative revolution: “This increasingly technical and mathematized version of geographical description, however, differed only superficially from the neo-Kantian tradition that helped to justify the isolation of geography from history, the social sciences, and Western Marxism.” [↩]
4. “Est-ce que ça a commencé avec Bergson ou avant ? L’espace, c’est ce qui était mort, figé, non dialectique. En revanche, le temps, c’était riche, fécond, vivant, dialectique.” [↩]
5. For a tour de force of geography in the service of state control, I encourage one to read the opening pages of Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics. The short version is that Ireland did not exist until the English crown needed to control it, so they sent in their surveyors to create an Ireland by mapping and dividing up the land. [↩]
6. On the other hand, Pavlovskaya mentions that even with the hard core quantitative work, “GIS technology has fulfilled its promise for quantitative analysis only marginally.” [↩]
7. These concerns are not appropriately addressed by the backtracking in the sentences that follow the quoted material. [↩]

Tags: Anne Kelly Knowles, ArcGIS, Barney Warf, digital humanities, Edward W. Soja, Environment and Planning A, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, GeoDa, geography, Geoinst, GIS, Henri Bergson, Literary and Linguistic Computing, manifesto, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Mark Monmonier, Martyn Jessop, Mei-Po Kwan, Michel Foucault, positivism, Richard Rorty, statistics, Thirdspace, visualization