{"id":2806,"date":"2013-07-03T13:27:33","date_gmt":"2013-07-03T13:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/digitalhumanities\/?p=2806"},"modified":"2013-06-30T13:34:57","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T13:34:57","slug":"mapping-17th-century-libel-performance-a-geodatabase-of-early-modern-devon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalhumanities.soton.ac.uk\/small-grants\/2806","title":{"rendered":"Mapping 17th century libel performance: a geodatabase of Early Modern Devon"},"content":{"rendered":"
This brief post aims to communicate and evaluate the outcomes of my participation on Clare Egan\u2019s project within the sotonDH framework. I will characterize the spatial data produced as a result, as well as offer a reflective account of my experiences collaborating with another researcher in a different Humanities discipline. Clare has previously detailed the raison d\u2019etre of the project<\/a> and the intriguing glimpses into the lives of Devonians in the seventeenth century that it offers, so this aspect will not be revisited in this post. I close with some musings on the value of specific projects such as this and its relationship to the way we do research more broadly.<\/p>\n I was brought on to this mapping project to realize three principal objectives:<\/p>\n The main piece of software I used for the process was ArcMap 10.1 and its attendant functionality as an engine for the management, analysis and visualization of spatial data.<\/p>\n The sequences of events and participants in them in a given libel case were presented to me by Clare as lists of locations, most often place names, but occasionally could be as specific as streets and named buildings. Although they are principally conceptualized in records as a time series of actions undertaken by various individuals, they clearly possess an inherent spatial quality that matters to their perception.<\/p>\n For the purposes of the project I chose to represent them as point patterns, with attached tabular data indicating pertinent information such as the directionality of people moving from point to point as the case developed (Figure 1). In one case that took place in the town of Tiverton, there is no additional information about where events happened. While this makes for a very small shapefile in a geodatabase, the lack of detail in what turned out to be a relatively low-status case tells its own tale when compared to sweeping high-status cases that spanned several counties.<\/p>\n Second, the physical maps were culled from maps of Devon produced in 1765 by Benjamin Donn. These documents are clearly significantly later in date than the period of time in which the libels took place. On the other hand, no acceptable (for present purposes meaning both accurate and readily available) substitute exists, as the seventeenth century represents the very beginning of scientific cartography in Europe. As such, Donn\u2019s maps were scanned at 600 dots per inch and georeferenced with the locations of medieval churches recorded by him throughout the towns and countryside of Devon. At a smaller scale, a street plan of Exeter was required for one of the larger cases. Fortunately, Donn also surveyed Exeter, and his plan was given the same treatment by cross-referencing multiple landmarks within the modern city with their locations on his map (Figure 2).<\/p>\n\n
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