An Example of The Digital Humanities in Historical Research: The Valley Of The Shadow Project
An exemplary historical project in the digital humanities is “The Valley of the Shadow” project, consisting of a large database about the people Augusta County, both Black and white, in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, from the late 1850s (prior to the War Between the States) to 1870, five years after Emancipation and the end of the war. The project was led by University of Richmond historian Edward Ayers. The importance of the work for the digital humanities stems from its innovative re-imagining of the relationship between geographic information systems (GIS) and history. The work is described in several scholarly articles, but the discussion that follows is drawn from a paper describing the development of the “Valley of the Shadow” (Ayers, 2011).
In this work, standard GIS methods were used to generate a series of focused, time-varying maps that allow patterns, relationships, and unexpected causalities to be discovered. Population characteristics were mapped onto landscapes, and different layers were added, representing race, wealth, and literacy, as well as natural and manufactured structures, such as rivers, roads, railroads, and soil types. Political features, such as voting patterns, were also represented as layers.
For these maps to be useful for obtaining new insights, the dynamic, or element of movement through time, needed to be represented. Human beings do not readily perceive the passage of time. However, they do perceive motion through space, and, consequently, the spatial element, facilitated by mapping and GIS, can assist in deepening a compelling sense of time passage by visualizing it. In other words, through GIS, time can be “converted” to motion, and can be visualized at different scales, such as hours, days, months, years, or decades.
According to Ayers, these “maps of time” facilitate multimodal cognition, wherein the visualization of temporal sequences through motion assist in discovery of causation.
Consequently, the “multimodal cognitive system” of human beings is best used with spatial “maps of time,” as motion is one of the key factors in formulating cause-and-effect, relationships, and emerging trends. The perception of simultaneous, dynamic time-varying patterns facilitates inferences based on common causes, while perceived sequential motion suggests causal relationships.
This combining of GIS and the temporal dimension through the layering mechanism characteristic of GIS led to new insights into the period immediately following the war. One such finding concerns the movement of people. Static maps of the Black population in the South in 1880 and 1910, before the Great Migration, may suggest little movement of this population, as the maps look essentially the same. However, viewed with a more fine-grained resolution – that is, by examining patterns in the intervening years – it is discovered that a great deal of movement did in fact occur, but was primarily limited to migration within the South. Even within this intra-southern movement, however, a shift can be seen to places further to the west, such as Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Such patterns are more easily discernible with this fine-grained view, as opposed to static images from 1880 and 1910. Furthermore, by examining another type of map, this time showing the percentage of the population in small towns in both 1880 and 1900, a clear trend can be observed indicating the emergence of cities and towns in the South. A crucially important factor in this trend towards urbanization can be seen through the investigation of maps of rail lines in 1870 and 1890, where the number of rail lines grew rapidly during this period – more rapidly than in the North, thereby suggesting that after the war, the South underwent greater transformational changes than the North.
Ayers provides more examples from the “Valley of the Shadow” project and draws conclusions on the integration of maps (GIS) and history. Geographic information systems use the concept of overlaid “layers” that display different things, such as rivers, topography, and population characteristics. Consequently, GIS is a way to display and facilitate the interpretation of patterns and structures, while, as discussed earlier, the main concern of history is “dynamics”, or motion. Consequently, integrating GIS and history provides a view into layers of events, causality, and, very importantly, the element of surprise and unpredictability. These observations lead to the insight that although it is difficult for humans to grasp the space-time relationship, combining them through mapping leads to a deepened understanding of both dimensions, and is therefore vital for historical investigations (Ayers, 2011).