I. Why map an art expedition from 1869?
II. What does this project reveal about William Bradford and his art?
III. What methodologies and design principles guided the work?
IV. Who contributed to the project?
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I. Why map an art expedition from 1869?
The inspiration to create a map of William Bradford’s 1869 art expedition to Greenland sprang from a standard scholarly impulse: to explain a gap in the historical record. The Arctic Regions, the ornate 1873 book of photographs that documented the expedition, contains groundbreaking images of the Arctic landscape, as well as the humans and non-human animals that lived there. And yet the book contains no map, a standard way of visualizing space. Tracing The Arctic Regions, therefore, began as a digital companion to my dissertation for Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History that sought to explain that cartographic absence and to fill it with new interpretations.
Other details about the photographs and their dissemination make the lack of a map all the more intriguing. Though charts were certainly essential to the ship’s navigation, The Arctic Regions presents no cartographic information about the route of the voyage. It’s possible that Bradford, as an artist, believed that the images should speak for themselves, remaining undiluted by other kinds of representation. Perhaps he wanted the photographs to provide an experience of the Frozen North that was at once more intimate and more atmospheric.
We do know, however, that Bradford included maps of Greenland and its complicated coastline in his slide lectures. This decision indicates that some level of orientation was necessary for viewers to appreciate where the photographs were taken and the general path of the journey.
More recently, art historical scholarship on Bradford and The Arctic Regions suggested that maps might provide new insights on the journey and the photographs. A 2008 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute (where I first encountered these photographs as a master’s student) and another at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in 2012, curated by Michael Lapides, both reconstructed the general arc of the expedition itinerary. “Chasing the Light,” a 2012 expedition organized by Zaria Forman, even attempted to retrace a section of Bradford’s voyage; the difficulties they encountered testify to the difficulties of Arctic navigation and mapmaking. This project owes much to those previous efforts, with particular gratitude to Michael Lapides and Mark Procnik, Librarian at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, for their help during my visits there.
As a digital humanities project, Tracing The Arctic Regions aims to advance this scholarship in several ways. First, it serves as an interactive companion to my dissertation on the same subject, showing how collaborative digital humanities methods can harmonize with more traditional monographic forms of scholarship. Next, by providing geographic and historical context to specific photographs, it also reveals new insights by quantifying and classifying photographs by genre and location. The project’s design also attempts to echo the experience of reading The Arctic Regions--an experience that, given the book’s rarity, most people will never have--by studiously generating a sense of both spatial and narrative movement. Finally, because of Greenland’s relevance in understanding climate change, Tracing The Arctic Regions frames these historical images so they can be compared with present day photographs of the same locations to show changes in the landscape.
II. What does this project reveal about William Bradford and his art?
While Tracing The Arctic Regions integrates methods from spatial history and the digital humanities, it is at its core an art historical exploration. As a result, questions about Bradford, John Dunmore and George Critcherson, the photographers who made the pictures for Bradford, and American art in general motivate much of the analysis.
The expedition was a remarkable feat for an American artist. The photographs from 1869 represent a groundbreaking photographic record of Arctic Greenland, covering thousands of miles of coastline. But the expedition also reveals much about the general importance of the Arctic to American art and visual culture. With support from a prominent industrial capitalist and participation of well-known explorers, the expedition further demonstrated the important role artists played in making sense of the Arctic.
Though Bradford appears as a minor character in the history of American art today, he was a popular and respected painter of his age. While addressing Bradford’s painting, this project also explores how the book of photographs has come to stand on its own terms as a historical and artistic artefact. This includes looking at photographs as the results of formal decisions by Dunmore and Critcherson, but also as expressions of larger cultural ideas about nature, exploration, race, and time.
As a result, questions about the “truthfulness” of specific photographs culminate with broader questions about visual and verbal rhetoric in the final essay. Armed with new insights from statistical analysis of the images, this project ultimately reveals more about how Bradford constructed the narratives of discovery, self-actualization and creativity that animated The Arctic Regions and the role of the artist in nineteenth-century American culture.
III. What methodologies and design processes guided the work?
This project began like so many digital humanities projects do: as a spreadsheet. By centering my dissertation on The Arctic Regions, I had created a study with unorthodox parameters, focusing both on a book as a single object and on various subsets of the images it contains. I began by searching for all extant copies of the book in library catalogs and museum collections around the world, eventually crowdsourcing a census for the volume. (While the prospectus from publisher Sampson, Low, Marston, Low and Searle set the intended print run at 350, the elevated cost of printing the volume meant that far fewer were produced; at this time, the census identifies only around 40 copies.)
Tallying up the books prompted me to approach the book’s images in a similar way, as a process for identifying themes and formal tendencies. As I leafed again and again through photographs of icebergs, Inuit villages and a steamship framed by precipitous fjords, questions about style and substance began to crystallize. Could we be certain about where and when these photographs were made? What was their most common subject matter? And what did the proportions of these subjects reveal about the intentions of the book’s creators?
Given that these questions concerned patterns woven between pictures, my research turned to related art historical studies for guidance, including a pioneering work by the renowned historian of art and material culture Jules Prown. His book Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material includes an essay titled “The Art Historian and the Computer,” in which he encoded works by the painter John Singleton Copley as data. While the steps involved in this statistical analysis stem from a different age--those were still the days of computer punch cards--Prown concluded in this 1964 study that this basic methodology of parsing different kinds of images would be fruitful for other forms of art history.
Yet while Prown’s work did provide important inspiration to this project, Tracing The Arctic Regions predominantly concerned different kind of information, in this case geospatial. While many projects in the digital humanities choose to represent historical phenomena as points on a map, my efforts to plot the locations of all images in The Arctic Regions quickly devolved into uncertainty; there was no way to verify the location of many images, especially those that depict icebergs adrift at sea. Because common geospatial software is built on an empirical model that requires precise coordinates, it became clear that an alternative mapping model would be necessary.
Increasingly I wondered what it would look like to represent the book on its own terms, as a continuous narrative built on a sequence of discrete views. That is, rather than plotting images on a heatmap (as I had done early in the project), was there a way to link images to movement through a map? This thought experiment was inspired by Johanna Drucker’s formative 2001 digital humanities quarterly article “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” which advocated, among other things, for a design process that represented the experience of humanistic information rather than abstracting historical events and objects into graphic data.
Sparked by these two inspirations and fueled by many other texts, conversations, and digital humanities projects along the way, Tracing The Arctic Regions took shape.
V. Who contributed to the project?
A long list of people helped to make this project possible. First and foremost have been the staff at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford. A friendship with Nicholas Bauch, a geographer whose Enchanting the Desert became the first digital monograph published by Stanford University Press, introduced me to other students and staff at the lab. Former Lab Manager Celena Allen was a pivotal sounding board during the early days of my research. Besides encouraging me throughout the development process, she also provided crucial advice on project management.
A 2014 Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship for art history + digital mapping further helped to formalize my project and define its scope more clearly. Along with a handful of other art historians, curators and museum technologists, I enjoyed several weeks of intense productivity and intense conversation at Middlebury College under the direction of the geographer Anne Knowles and architectural historian Paul Jaskot. Besides helping me to resolve issues of distortion inherent to my project--we had to cast aside all mercator-projected maps in favor of a polar azimuthal equidistant alternative to represent Greenland more fairly--Anne and Paul also incubated the fellows into a generous community that still shares ideas and organizes conference sessions to this day. One of those Kress fellows, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, deserves special thanks for inviting me to present earlier stages of this work at a symposium on mapping at Emory University, where she is Assistant Professor of African Art History.
With this important groundwork laid, I returned to Stanford armed with new skills and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Zephyr Frank, Professor of History and then-director of CESTA, believed in my project enough to provide support for two research assistants over two years. The first, Frank Zheng, an undergraduate computer science major, tackled the challenge of developing prototypes for a bespoke, scrolling interface, modelled after sites like the New York Times’ “The Russia Left Behind” article. Alyssa Vann, a second RA, brilliantly absorbed the lessons from that first revolution and create a new javascript site housed on GitHub. Tom Mullaney, Professor of Chinese History, served as a mentor during this process, offering invaluable insights from his own digital project with Stanford University Press, The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China . David Medieros, Specialist at the Stanford Geospatial Center, helped us navigate some tricky interactions with maps. Jason Heppler, a resident postdoc in history, answered many questions about GeoJSON with patience and humor. As a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow at the lab, I learned a great deal from fellowship director and Stanford Digital Research Architect Nicole Coleman. All the while we received illuminating feedback from colleagues at CESTA, colleagues at Stanford Libraries’ Center for Interdisciplinary Research, and many visitors to the lab.
In the end, the CESTA community prevented this from becoming one of those unfinished and thus unrecognized dh projects. My digital work began to languish as the deadline approached to submit a standard written dissertation. While I had fruitful conversations about the project with Drs. Petra Chu and Elizabeth Buhe, editors of the online journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, they were unable to offer a publication grant to Tracing The Arctic Regions, another example of the funding gaps that can lay siege to digital humanities projects at the graduate level and beyond. Fortunately, Amanda Wilson Bergado and Brian Kersey, both CESTA staff, helped to revive Tracing The Arctic Regions after I completed my doctorate and returned to lab to manage a collaboration with the Cantor Arts Center.
None of this would have been possible without the boundless energy of Erik Steiner, the Creative Director of the Spatial History Project. In addition to crafting the cartographic elements of the site, he also solved a host of technical challenges that were beyond my abilities. His patience, encouragement and friendship are responsible for bringing Tracing The Arctic Regions to life.