The above web app, created using ArcGIS Online, maps the provenance of the Neolithic Chinese pot that my group 3D modeled for the Perlman Teaching Museum last week. It includes the pot’s transactional stops in Hong Kong and Atherton, California before coming to its current home at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.
I think that our map worked out quite well. We were able to get all of the stops plotted with labels, photos, and links. Still, none of the information really seems like it needed to be mapped. Our pot has had a fairly simplistic journey from China to Carleton which could just as easily be described in a sentence or two of text. The map doesn’t really seem to add anything on its own besides a visual for the sake of having a visual.
This connects with my main thought on web mapping in general. It certainly seems useful in public-facing projects, as visuals do increase engagement and comprehension. When thinking of a scholarly Digital Humanities piece, though, the applications become far more select, in my opinion. There is a whole lot of effective spatial presentation that you can do with precise word choice. Text as a whole is also more accessible than web mapping (its free after all, unlike ArcGIS), and also is only limited by the creator’s mind, not the technology or software package being used. For web mapping to be useful in a scholarly DH project, then, it must serve an irreplaceable function. Projects like the sightlines from a digitally recreated map of Gettysburg meet this criteria because web mapping was the most effective way to present the evidence, which was digital in origin. It seems like this wouldn’t be true of every spatial question, though.
2 thoughts on “Mapping our Neolithic Pot’s Provenance”
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I really like this post, Scott! I agree with you that web mapping, in order to be useful, must only serve an irreplaceable function. For this assignment, I don’t know if our web map added that much to our understanding of our artifact’s provenance that couldn’t be done through plain text. I’m really curious about web mapping though, so I’d like to see some other examples of web mapping that tell a more complex story than what we did in this assignment.
I’m really impressed by your map! The map itself is labeled clearly, it’s very apparent that you’re showing the path of your jar throughout time. Your embedding onto your blog is also good, I couldn’t seem to figure out how to make that work. That’s a really good point that text can often be enough to tell a story, I didn’t consider that mapping software might not be necessary in the first place for this type of project. Nice work!