Looking at maps

1This is a story of exciting and promising technological advances. This is a story of catching a glimpse of what the future of the humanities might look like. This is also a story of mild disappointment.

2My work on American literature focuses on the place of maps and mapping in literary texts – more specifically on the actual maps that writers have used, touched, handled, copied, or simply seen. Maps have played a key role in American history, most of the time as instruments of discovery, exploration, appropriation, colonization, negotiation, and displacement, but sometimes also as tools of resistance and environmental awareness. As such, they have profoundly shaped the ways in which literary texts have thought about space and geographical knowledge in the North American context. Across American literary history, examples of interactions between maps and texts abound, from the colonial period and its concern with exploration, to 19^th-century (re)assessments of territorial expansion, to early-21^st century environmental preoccupations. For instance, William Byrd’s narrative of the 1728 surveying expedition tasked with establishing the straight boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina (see Berland) is deeply influenced by cartographic elements. The map that was being traced by Byrd’s surveyors during the expedition serves as a fundamental framework for his depiction of the environment and the Native American inhabitants. Throughout the 19^th century, maps played a crucial role for writers in an era of territorial expansion and rapid globalization. Authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville used maps to ground their novels in specific geographical settings. Henry David Thoreau, a skilled surveyor himself, drew upon his cartographic expertise to imbue his non-fiction works with a profound sense of place and to cultivate his environmental consciousness (Nègre). Moving into the 20^th century, “road” novels such as The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, and even Lolita, are profoundly “cartographically-inflected” (Brückner 325). Contemporary works continue to resort to maps to explore themes such as personal and racial identity (Lauret Savoy, Trace, 2015), as well as to delve into the intricate historical layers of particular locations (William Least-Heat Moon, PrairyErth, 1991).

3The way we think of these interactions between maps and texts has slowly evolved over the last forty years. Throughout the 1990s, approaches to maps and mapping were profoundly shaped by the field of critical cartography, which tended to focus on the ideological bias of cartographic enterprises (Wood, Monmonier). Since the late 2000s, the “processual” turn in map theory has encouraged scholars to pay attention not only to the biased production of maps, but also to the particular significance of their reception. Thinkers like Dodge, Kitchin, and Perkins have shown that the gestures performed by users when they handle a map (such as folding, annotating, cutting, etc.) provide it with a specific meaning and agency. The multiple approaches to maps outlined in Opérations cartographiques (2017), edited by Jean-Marc Besse and Gilles A. Tiberghien, show that maps are now envisioned in a more imaginative and fruitful manner. In much the same vein, Tania Rossetto’s “object-oriented cartography” (2019) explores the “thingness” of maps and shifts the focus not only to the geographical knowledge that the map figures, but also to its very surface and materiality. In the continuity of this line of inquiry, I work to identify the cartographic documents used by American writers across history and to study the way maps have shaped literary writings, both as sums of knowledge and as material objects.

4Over the last ten years, my research has greatly benefited from the digital resources that cultural institutions around the world have made accessible online, such as, for instance, the David Rumsey Map Collection, Gallica (at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France), the Bodleian Library (the First Folio for example), or the Library of Congress. Hundreds of thousands of ancient maps, in particular, have been digitized and can be viewed online freely. Examining maps online through ultra-high-definition viewers is not only a great way to reduce research costs and gain time, but very often it proves even more productive than holding the original documents in your hands. Having the ability to zoom in and out, and to check the entire set of metadata at a glance (size, date, provenance, etc.), is helpful in trying to evaluate the significance and meaning of a cartographic document.

5These digital surrogates, however, do not allow researchers to have full sensory access to the map’s materiality. In my own research, for example, I have worked on three hand-drawn maps of Cape Cod prepared by Henry David Thoreau. One of them is kept at the Concord Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts, while the other two are at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The three maps offer a useful picture of Thoreau’s multi-scalar approach to the Cape. To determine how they were related to each other, I needed to determine which one had been drawn first and which ones were tracings. To do so, I had to enlist the help of librarians at the Huntington to have a better idea of the texture of these different documents. “Can you touch the paper and tell me what it’s like? Is it thick and rough, or very thin and smooth?” It turned out that one of these maps was drawn on very thin tracing paper, while the other one (a reduced version of the previous one) was drawn on sturdy cardboard-like paper. The way the librarians described their tactile experience of these maps played a key role in my research. They allowed me to understand how Thoreau had worked. First, he traced an existing map to produce the hand-drawn map kept in Concord. Then, he used tracing paper to duplicate a portion of that first tracing. Eventually, he used a geometric technique to scale down his drawing and produce a portable, pocket-size map of the northern part of the Cape.

6Tactility played a crucial role in this context, but the matter of size and scale was also significant. The difference in size between the two Huntington maps was not readily discernible on my computer screen, as both images were automatically displayed in full-screen mode. The dissimilarity would have been apparent, of course, had I been able to travel 9 000 kms to examine the maps in person. While digital surrogates open up exciting new avenues for research and accessibility, they also raise important questions regarding the perception of scale. This is particularly true with maps. Reading a physical map is a bodily situated experience: it requires holding the map, leaning over it, standing in front of it if it is hanging on the wall, etc. These different gestures allow the user to implicitly perceive the map’s proportions, and, as such, they profoundly shape the experience of the object. For this reason, any study focusing on a writer’s direct interactions with maps must take the question of the perception of size, and thus of scale, into account.

What texture for digital surrogates?

7This concern with the texture and materiality of digital objects has gained traction in recent years. In “The Digitized Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts” (2020), L. W. C. van Lit discusses the dichotomy between the intense experience of handling an ancient document in a brick-and-mortar library (a highly ritualized procedure, in a silent and nearly religious environment), and the ease with which we now have access to a hyper-abundance of digitized manuscripts from our homes. Looking at a manuscript on a computer screen is not the equivalent of touching it in a traditional library, and this difference must be taken into account. Calling for “new habits for philologists in a digital world” (69), van Lit argues that researchers must explicitly acknowledge the use of digital surrogates and include in their publications a detailed description of how they have worked with them. In “Texturing the Digital Humanities: A Manifesto” (2020), Sari Altschuler and David Weimer discuss the issue of the accessibility of digital documents for sighted and non-sighted readers, from the perspective of disability studies. They try to imagine how future developments might allow for a better access to online archives, for example with their website Touch This Page!, which experiments with 3D printing and audio descriptions. At the end of the article, Altschuler and Weimer envision “three tactile futures grounded in what our present technology can do”: in the year 2025, a researcher uses a Virtual Reality (VR) headset and haptic gloves to experience the texture of paper on a 14^th-century manuscript; in 2030, a librarian uses a tactile scanner to produce a digitally textured facsimile of a 19^th-century book in Boston line type (a precursor to braille); and, in 2035, a visually-impaired student uses a special printer in her own home to produce textured copies of several different editions of a 19^th-century novel, “study[ing] the feel of pages and bindings, drawing novel conclusions about [the book’s] material history across time and space” (85-86).

8These three case studies focus on tactile accessibility and necessitate technologies whose development is still a certain way off. The first case is probably the more realistic from today’s perspective. Haptic gloves are still being developed and the first models are only available for extremely high prices, but VR headsets have already become very common. While sensory access to digitized documents is still hard to implement today, VR can be used to replicate the experience of being in front of a specific document, and of visually gauging its size and its proportions – one of the key issues raised by digital surrogates. Consider, for example, this nautical chart of the Pacific Ocean, published by J. W. Norie in 1836: https://www.davidrumsey.com/​luna/​servlet/​s/​t33g12 (the chart is made up of two separate sheets for the Northern and Southern Pacific; the two sheets have been digitally stitched together to create this composite image). This document is a brilliant compendium of the nautical knowledge that had been acquired over several decades of Western exploration of the Pacific Ocean. By indicating not only the position of dozens of minuscule islands but also the dates when some of them were observed by specific captains (“Perouse 1786” in the Sandwich Islands, for example), it also functions as an archive of the European presence in the Pacific, at a time when French and British efforts to colonize and Christianize the Pacific Islands were accelerating. This copy of Norie’s chart is also particularly noteworthy because it was used by an American whaling captain who added multiple inscriptions in pencil representing the routes that he followed in the 1840s and 1850s. As such, Norie’s Pacific chart is a fascinating document to highlight how cartographic interactions have shaped Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). While it is not explicitly referred to in the novel, the toponyms it uses for the Japanese islands match those used in chapter 109 of the novel – “Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke,” three names that are almost never found in combination on other charts of the period (Melville 473). The markings added by the captain offer a rare picture of the specific temporality of whaling trips in the Pacific in the mid-1800s.

9I have used this chart in the classroom on several occasions, asking students to explore the document online on their laptops and to identify its most salient traits. While students are generally able to quickly notice the references to earlier explorers of the Pacific, and to follow the whaler’s pencil annotations (there is even a small sperm-whale drawn somewhere if you look closely), most of them usually overlook its most striking characteristic, which is, very simply, that the chart is extremely large. At 160 × 183 cm (80 × 183 for each sheet), the map is a sizable object. It is so broad that it would be impossible for most adults to hold it in their hands, even with their arms spread. Handling it (unfolding it, spreading it on a table, leaning over it, identifying the relevant geographical information, annotating it, refolding it, etc.) must have required a full-body engagement with the object as a whole. By default, however, the image is resized by the web browser to fit the user’s computer screen. While the exact size of the document is of course given in the metadata displayed on the David Rumsey online interface, it is easy to overlook it or, more simply, to fail to realize its true dimensions. This is problematic because the chart is more than the geographical information it contains. It is also a material document that occupies a lot of space in the world. In the cramped space of a whaling ship’s cabin, it was probably impossible to unfold it entirely, thus forcing the captain to glimpse only some portions of the map on which he was logging his route. From that perspective, the chart is comparable to the depiction of the sperm-whale in chapter 55 of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael explains that it is so huge and massive that it is impossible to ever behold it in its entirety. This aspect of Norie’s chart is not perceptible on a traditional computer screen, making it an interesting case study to explore the possibilities offered by VR, following Altschuler’s and Weimer’s suggestions.

Experimenting with VR

11The Quest 2 is equipped with two wireless hand-held controllers that are used to navigate menus and perform gestures in VR. When your headset is on, you see your virtual hands holding virtual controllers that are identical to the ones you are holding in the real world. Buttons and triggers on the controllers are used to click on features in VR. But the Quest 2 is also equipped with a hand-tracking technology that is regularly updated. When you put down your controllers, the headset can recognize and track your (bare) hands and replicate them in VR. Two grayish, virtual, and transparent hands appear in front of you and imitate your hand gestures with no perceptible latency. Joining your thumb and index fingers to form an “O” allows you to click on virtual buttons.

12While it is possible to download image files onto the Quest 2 (in common image formats such as *.jpeg), there exists no hand-tailored application to handle digitized documents in VR. A very basic image viewer is available on the device, but it does not even have a zooming option. For this reason, in mid-2022, the easiest way to handle digitized archives in VR was to use the online interfaces of institutional websites. To do so, one can use the built-in Quest browser. This browser is displayed on a slightly curved screen inside the virtual home environment. Like any regular browser, it includes a navigation bar and a pop-up keyboard. The “size” of the screen can be enlarged to fill the entire environment. It would be meaningless to try to give the measurements of this screen since it only exists in a virtual space, but the enlarged screen can fill your entire field of vision, making for a highly immersive experience. The buttons of the chosen website can be used to zoom in and out, but it is also possible to physically move closer to the screen or lean toward it (the Oculus can be used while standing or while sitting at a desk). Some interfaces, like the David Rumsey Map Collection, offer a “full-screen” option. When this option is activated in VR, the home environment disappears, and the map is displayed over an entirely black background. It is also possible to use an application like Virtual Desktop, which uses the local Wi-Fi network to connect your computer to the VR headset. In this case, the headset is used as a secondary monitor: you can cast your computer screen into the VR environment. This, in turn, allows you to use the imaging applications that you run on your computer. In this case, it is possible to work with your own image files (offline) and not be restricted to the images available online.

Losing the sense of scale

13Essentially, when examining high-resolution images with a Quest 2, it is necessary to use a web browser within the VR environment to access online websites that were not specifically designed for VR. As one of my students remarked at the end of a workshop, “it’s pretty because it’s in VR, but it’s still a screen.” She was, of course, perfectly right. Even though VR provides an immersive experience that allows users to display image files onto a screen that appears to be gigantic within the displayed virtual environment, there is no major difference, at the end of the day, with a traditional monitor. Ideally, it should be possible to calibrate the size of the virtual screen in order to display images in such a way that their actual proportions are not lost to the viewer. In effect, however, the sense of scale is profoundly reconfigured in the headset’s virtual environment. Our perception of scale is assessed relatively, by comparing an object to another. Since the setting is digitally generated (a couch, a desk, a window, etc.), it bears resemblance to elements found in video games. This poses a challenge in assessing the “size” of individual components and adjusting the screen accordingly. The only available reference point is the size of the virtual hands used inside the virtual environment. But whose hands are they? The hands displayed in VR are so standardized, colorless, and genderless that they seem strangely disembodied. Cognitively, it seems impossible to use the size of these hands to evaluate and adjust the perceived “size” of the screen and of the documents themselves.

14The texture of the documents also remains elusive. Providing a tactile perception (or even simply a visual representation) of paper texture would require adding a sense of depth, and thus a third dimension, while image files are 2D objects. The very high quality of the digitized documents available online compensate for this deficiency, however, by allowing users to zoom in and observe extremely small details. In the highly immersive environment of VR, this level of detail becomes meaningful and partially allows users to replicate the experience of a close examination in the real world.

15VR allows us to catch a glimpse of how future researchers might use digitized documents, but the technology that is available today is still too limited. So, what would an ideal VR experience look like? To begin with, digitized documents should be rescanned to take into account their thickness and texture (a possibility that Altschuler and Weimer envision for 2035, the specific paper texture of each document being encoded in the metadata of its digital surrogate). This would enable viewers to handle them in 3D, in much the same way that terrestrial globes have been digitized in 3D on Gallica. Additionally, with the use of haptic gloves that replicate the texture, weight, and thickness of the original maps, users would be able to recreate the intricate sensory experience of handling an ancient map in a brick-and-mortar library.

16Such a formatting revolution would also make it possible to forgo the use of a virtual screen. Imagine a virtual environment in which digitized documents are placed on virtual shelves. Instead of bringing them up on a screen, you could use your virtual hands to seize the documents and spread them on a table. Those virtual hands would of course be carefully scaled to the actual dimensions of the documents, thus giving you an accurate sense of their proportions. Apps exist that explore the handling of virtual objects, like Gravity Sketch or Shapes, so this would only be an extension of already existing possibilities.

17Virtual Reality offers a profoundly rescaled environment in which to do research. While its tactile input is still limited at the moment, it opens up promising possibilities in terms of accessibility, cost reduction, and extreme immersivity. Insofar as the Quest 2 environment was created primarily with video games in mind, it is not designed to take into account the question of scale and of accurately rendering the proportions of real-world objects. The headset’s hand-tracking technology, however, shows that interesting future developments are possible. Far from being a simple cosmetic trick, it suggests that a relation can be established between the objects in VR and the user’s sense of her or his own body. This, in turn, will allow for fine-tuned recalibration and an improved sense of scale.