The Art of Maps: An Interview with Anne Knowles

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the latest
installment of Being Human from the
University of Pittsburgh.
This series is devoted to exploring
the humanities, their connections to
other disciplines, and their value
in the public world.
I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of
the Humanities Center at Pitt.
My guest today is Anne
Knowledge, McBride Professor of History
at the University of Maine.
Professor Knowles is one of the
country's leading scholars of
historical geographic information
systems, or GIS, which
allow a user to gather, organize,
and evaluate historical information
related to space.
Professor Knowles has used the GIS
to examine a range of historical
events and phenomena, including the
Battle of Gettysburg, the American
Iron Industry, and the Holocaust.
In the process, she's brought new
insight to our understandings of
these events and to our use of
digital tools in the humanities.
Because so many modern GIS
technologies are digital, Professor
Knowles inevitably confronts
questions about how digital tools
can capture the richness and
complexity of human experience.
She responds to these questions in a
few different ways.
The first is by expanding the range
of materials she works with.
For example, in her newest work,
using digital tools to analyze the
ways that space is represented in
Holocaust survivor testimony.
The second is by reflecting on her
work with digital technology and
emphasizing the human elements
involved in it, such as the patience
required to translate data,
the willingness to accept
uncertainty in that translation, and
the collaboration the GIS
encourages.
And a third is by using manual or
other technologies when digital
tools can't adequately represent the
history she studies, a process
she calls inductive visualization.
As you'll hear in our discussion,
map-making for Professor Knowles
sounds a lot more like an art than
an exact science.
I began my conversation with
Professor Knowles by asking her
about her love of maps and the
discovery that led to her career as
an academic.
What happened was that I was working
for a textbook publisher
in Chicago and got
a really choice assignment of
editing a brand new edition of an
American history textbook.
And the thing that was going to
distinguish this book in the
marketplace was that it was going to
include over 100 original
maps to tell
American history cartographically.
The man who was in charge of
that part of the book development
was Michael Conzen, an historical
geographer at the University of
Chicago.
And I spent nine months
with him, basically having weekly
tutorials in how to
map American history.
It made history vivid
for me in a way I'd never
seen it before.
I'd traveled as a kid with my
family. My dad loved history,
and we'd see historic sites.
But when you see it through maps,
you get a much richer sense,
I think, of the context of history.
Where are things happening?
Where are they not?
What is the sequence of events?
How important was physical geography
like rivers and mountains in shaping
where people settled when in the
conduct of war and all kinds of
things?
So I became terribly excited.
And at the end of the project, when
the book was published, I literally
said to Michael, "How can I keep
doing this?" And he said,
"You go to graduate school in
historical geography." So
I feel like I was born again
at the age of 30 as a historical
geographer, and I'm still
as much in love with it now as
I was then. It's endlessly
interesting to me because every
part of history takes place
somewhere.
And once you begin to recognize
how important places are in people's
lives, then
just every day walks through
a neighborhood make you think
historically.
I just love it.
Yeah. So I
want to talk with you a little bit
about some of the projects.
And your most recent project
involves geography and Holocaust
studies.
But I wonder if you can start just
by talking a little bit about--
because you published too on the
history of the iron industry.
Can you talk a little bit about how
kind of that interest that you just
talked about in geography and place
shaped that research that
you did in the two books that you've
published on the history of the iron
industry?
Yeah, that's a great question
because actually walking through
the landscape has always been
crucial for my historical
imagination.
My first book out of my
Ph.D. was about Welsh immigrants to
the U.S., specifically southern
Ohio, a part of the country
that people in Pittsburgh will know
well, a little town called
Oak Hill.
And the Welsh settlers
who went there were farmers,
but it was an iron-making
region. They were in the middle of
the Hanging Rock Iron Region.
So I learned a little bit about the
iron industry and found out that
Welsh immigrants were especially
important because they
had great skills in South Wales
and places like Cardiff and Merthyr
Tydfil that were valuable to
American businessmen.
So I decided I'd look into it more
and the first thing I did was
walk around with my
friend Mike Struble in
the woods of southern Ohio, looking
at old blast furnaces.
And some people might think, "Oh, my
God, that's so boring.
Iron. What could be more dull than
that?" But these furnaces
are like pharaonic temples
made of massive stone blocks.
They stand about 60 feet tall
in the wilderness.
And you think, "How in heaven's did
this get here?
What is this thing?" And
that was the beginning of my
fascination.
Of course, you can't study the iron
industry without coming to
Pittsburgh. I spent a lot of time at
the Heinz Center looking at
manuscripts, but all the
time, I was coming back to
the geographical question
of where was the iron industry.
How did it shape local economies?
Who settled in a particular
iron town?
What were their lives like?
So it's a kind of moving back and
forth between history and the
landscape for me that makes
the history of the iron industry, or
really anything else, a sort of
human story.
Yeah. Well, I want to maybe stay
with this question about place and
geography for just a second
because when one of the things that
you've written about in your most
recent project on the Holocaust
studies and geography, you talked
about geography, a place not playing
as big a role in Holocaust studies
before 2010 as plenty of other
disciplines, even though the field
of Holocaust studies was decades old
at that point.
I wonder if you can talk a little
bit about why you
think that was the case, that it
hadn't played that big a role.
And what you've been able to
contribute-- what you and others
have been able to contribute,
thinking about place, thinking about
space, thinking about geographical
questions in the Holocaust in the
last ten plus years.
I think there are a couple reasons
why the study of the Holocaust
had not been geographical before.
One is that
there is an enormous--
there are enormous
archives related to the Holocaust,
as many people know, or you
might just guess. The Nazis
were terrific record keepers,
and there are millions
of documents that they kept.
They were businesslike
in their approach.
They were excellent planners,
and lots and lots of regular
business people got involved to
use Jews, especially
as forced labor. They left records.
When you have an enormous archive of
written documents, that is
a starting point for most
historical work.
So fair enough.
People have been mining those
archives.
Another key kind of
documentary record
are the testimonies
given in oral and written interviews
with Holocaust survivors.
There are tens of thousands of
those interviews that are enormously
valuable, so scholars have been
using those.
So what we have so far and what
I'm describing are superb
textual records
that conventional historical
approaches can work
with very, very well.
But there was one man, an English
historical geographer named Andrew
Charlesworth, who
became interested in the Holocaust
about 20 years ago,
went to places like
Auschwitz, the Warsaw Ghetto,
Krakow, and walked
the landscape and then wrote some
very moving essays about
what he saw.
Charlesworth's great insight
was that the Holocaust didn't
just take place in the big, awful
places that we know about, like
Auschwitz.
But it took place in train stations.
It took place in public parks.
It took place in public schools
where people were held while
they were waiting for the trains to
come in to take them away to
Auschwitz.
In other words, the mundane,
everyday landscapes of
Germany and Poland, and other parts
of Europe were also part
of the Holocaust.
His essay became
the seed of an idea, about
ten years ago, for
the organization of an
interdisciplinary seminar
at the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, D.C., that I was
a part of.
It was a group of geographers and
historians who came together really
just to discuss might
it be interesting to study the
Holocaust geographically and how
would we do that?
The group of the nine
of us in a basement room
for two weeks together had
such an electrifying experience.
Not only did we say, "Yes, we can
study the Holocaust geographically,"
but "Oh my God, this is
the whole unknown history
of the Holocaust.
How did it unfold across the
landscape?
Which places were created and
destroyed?
What happened when people were
dislocated from
their shtetls to
a big city like Warsaw
in a ghetto where no one speaks
their language?" So it
just opened up an enormous number of
new research questions, which
the Holocaust Geographies
Collaborative, the group that I'm
very proud to be a part of,
has been pursuing now for a decade,
and we see no end in sight.
Yeah.
One thing I think about that
collective is it's a very
interdisciplinary group.
So one of the things that your work,
and you could see this in the-- you
published Geographies of the
Holocaust in 2014 with some of the
same people, yes, that you got
together with that group.
So some of what I
noticed in reading your work was
that the questions - you were asking
these questions about place -
allow for a very interdisciplinary
kind of grouping of people that
work together. Has that been one of
the benefits that you've seen of
asking the kinds of questions that
you ask?
Very much so.
In
scholarship, generally place is
becoming a nexus
for interdisciplinary work.
So if you think about what is a
place, take Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh is a city.
Okay. People who are interested in
cities study urban planning.
They study pollution.
They study here the history of
industry, but also the history of
the arts and philanthropy,
the history of immigration,
literature, people who have written
about this city, how the city
has been symbolized in
art. So you can see it's
kind of a natural way
to think about the richness of our
located lives.
In the case of the Holocaust,
thinking about place,
for one thing, pulls together
those two kinds of massive archives
that I was describing a minute ago,
the perpetrator archives of the
Nazis and
the victim archives of people's
lived experience.
And not just suffering but also
how they resisted, how they
maintained their faith, how
they tried to keep their families
together, how they found food.
All of that takes
place.
It also gets
funny. It kind of takes a village
to do this kind of research.
You need people who can do the
historical work.
You need people who can make maps.
You need people who are sensitive
to language,
literary scholars, feminist
scholars.
So we find that the collaborative
is a kind of natural meeting
place for scholars
of many backgrounds
who have a common interest in what
happened to people in places of
trauma.
Yeah.
Well, I want to
ask a little bit more specific
question about your work with
place because
for many years now, you've been
working on integrating geographic
information systems or GIS
into a study, as it's known, into
the study of history.
This is a particular way
to, as I see it, a particular kind
of tool or technology.
I know there's a difference between
talking about it as one or the
other, but you can talk about that
in a moment.
I see it as a specific way to
approach some of the big picture
questions we've been talking about.
Right? It's a way to kind of like to
address interesting questions of
space and place.
For our listeners that may not know
what GIS is, can
you give us kind of a big picture
sense of what it is?
Sure.
By the way, I've got to say you're
marvelously prepared for all of
this. That's probably the best "what
is GIS" question I've ever had.
Good. I'm honored.
GIS, Geographic
Information Systems,
is a name for
a whole collection of software
that attaches
attributes to spatial
coordinates.
Coordinates, meaning like latitude
and longitude.
That's what we call the spatial part
of GIS.
It can be points.
It can be lines
like the course of a river
or the boundary of a
electoral ward,
or it can be whole areas,
points, lines, areas.
The attribute part of
GIS means what are the
characteristics of those points,
lines, or polygons?
And those can be
anything you can
imagine.
It can be the population of a city.
It can be the number
of customers who go to Walmart.
Some of the biggest users
of GIS are
global businesses who need
to incorporate geographic
planning in their corporate
strategies and
defense departments around
the world because GIS
is, of course, used to target smart
bombs and plan
flying routes for bombers and
everything else.
So what GIS
has become in the world
is a sort of
Cartesian net of
places that
people want to think about
strategically one way or another.
For history, GIS
is still relatively new,
and I would call it-- I prefer to
think of it really as a method
rather than a tool or a technology.
It is both of those things too.
But I use GIS
as a way of thinking about
and analyzing the past.
For my GIS, the iron industry,
for example, had a list
of about a thousand ironworks,
their spatial location in
latitude and longitude, and then
how big were they.
When were they built?
When were they closed?
Who managed them?
How many workers did they have,
etc.? So you can begin to see a
spreadsheet of information
attached to places.
That's the gist of the kind
of GIS that most
people do.
Yeah. I wonder, let's see--
I wonder if you can give us an
example of what-- we've talked a
little bit about place
and how thinking about place can
contribute to thinking about
history. Can you talk a little bit -
this is kind of a more specific
version of that question - of what
GIS can do
that contributes to
historical scholarship?
Oh.
Something that many people say is
the great power, the great
capacity of
GIS is that it can hold any
amount of information.
So in
the days that we're in now of
digital scholarship, lots of people
talk about big data versus
the very close reading of a little
bit of data. In
the big data world of
GIS, in the Holocaust project now,
we are contemplating
maybe, within the next ten years,
building a GIS of the Holocaust
that would contain 60,000
places, each
of which is located in space
and time with its
attributes. And what are those
60,000 places?
They are the places that the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
is documenting in its enormous
encyclopedia of camps and ghettos.
All of the places that the Nazis
and their allies imprisoned
people, tortured them, killed them,
put them to forced labor, etc..
When you have that many places
that you want to analyze, you need
a pretty big horse to
do the work. And that's what
GIS is going to do. It's going to
transform the study
of the Holocaust by enabling
comparative, complicated
analysis of the entire
system that the Nazis put in place.
Yeah. I want to kind of--
one thing that I was really
interested to read in your book from
2002-- it's kind of an early book on
working with GIS.
Past Time, Past Place is the name of
the book.
There's an example
in that book of a Civil War
historian talking about - and
this I'm thinking here of kind of a
practical benefit of working with
GIS - talking about being
better equipped to fight
for preserving land
because GIS actually could provide
kind of visual
accounts of what existed
there and why it was important.
And that this kind of enabled him to
kind of match up well with
developers, who we all-- when
you imagine a developer making a
pitch, what do you see?
You see kind of these big like plan,
visions, and look at this great
mixed-use housing facility we'll
build. That kind of thing.
So that seemed to me to be a really
practical benefit of GIS as helping
kind of preservationists
talk about the past and kind
of what it looks like and things
like that.
Are there other kinds of practical
benefits that GIS has given to
people who work with land and
history and things like that?
Well, the example of
battlefield preservation is
a really good one in Northern
Virginia, which that article is
largely about.
Developers have been
building luxury
developments, condo developments
like mad, many of them over trenches
from the Civil War.
And there are real issues
at stake of history and cultural
values and what matters in society
in the long term.
I think one of the most interesting
sort of categories of that
counter use that's very practical
and culturally important using
GIS is called community
mapping, where people have
gone to places like Belize
and brought in
local teenagers and elders
and all sorts of people from the
community to learn how to use G.P.S.
to
walk around a landscape, collecting
location points that you can then
put on a map in GIS.
And then, they can make
the arguments against
the Del Monte company
that wants to build another banana
plantation.
And they can say, "No, no, no, no.
This is where we have been
harvesting nuts
and wild fruits and doing certain
kinds of hunting for about 2000
years. So, hands off, Del Monte."
What this means
is whichever
cultural group is learning
the tool can
apply it in their interest.
And we have to acknowledge
that the most skillful people using
GIS today are the people
with their hands on the buttons
for the bombs.
But the rest of us can
educate ourselves equally
to make those counterarguments. In
the context of the Holocaust, I
think one of the things that's
exciting is lots
of university professors, many
of them out of history departments
now, who lead field trips
to Holocaust sites with their
students, are beginning to
have them make maps.
And so students can make
a map journal of their
experiences.
And then, the map becomes the
background for a story.
This is something that I find
really rich.
It's a combination of the arts
and history and geography
that personal narratives and
spatial storytelling are
becoming more and more popular.
Maybe that's not practical.
Maybe it's a little more dreamy,
but it's personally important to
people.
Yeah.This actually kind
of like gets us up, I think, into--
relates well to the next question I
was going to ask.
Because you and a lot of other
people who've dealt with
GIS in scholarship who talk a lot
about the use of
the tool being shaped by
the technology itself and that
there are opportunities that it
provides. There are also constraints
that exist with it.
So I wonder if you can talk a little
bit about that, about both and
with relation to your own work, both
the opportunities and some of the
constraints that exist in GIS.
Yeah, this is a really important
question, Dan,
because
I don't ever want to be
a cheerleader for GIS.
It doesn't solve all problems.
It's very good
when you're working with
consistently documented
information and places
with known location.
But to come back to the Holocaust
example, those testimonies I was
talking about are full of reference
to place.
But as you can imagine, as people
are dislocated when they're on the
cattle car heading to a camp
or they're being marched through
the woods for kilometers,
they get further and further away
from home. They become disoriented.
They don't know where they are.
They are undergoing traumatic
experiences.
So their descriptions of place,
in some ways, become more and more
important because they're talking
about their emotional and physical
difficulties.
But at the same time, it becomes
harder and harder to map
in the way that GIS demands.
GIS forces you to be precise.
And so, it can create what we
call specious accuracy.
You're making it up.
You don't really know where someone
was.
And the approach that I've
encouraged, particularly students
who I work with, to use
is something I call inductive
visualization, where you
draw by hand on a piece of paper
with colored pencils.
You work more impressionistically in
a way that is in keeping with
the spirit and the content of your
source.
So what I like to do,
and we're doing this in the
Holocaust Geographies Collaborative
more broadly, we
like to keep the whole range of
visual approaches in mind
so that the
method that you choose is
as appropriate as possible to the
material you're working with.
Right. And
you've written about inductive
visualization. And that
doesn't-- I mean, I think I'm just
kind of repeating something that
you just mentioned, but there's
no technology
that
you're entering into at that point,
right?
Well, the technology of the pencil.
Sure.
Which some people say that
the hand holding something
is the first tool.
What I find is that
there there are so many
intervening
structures when you work
on a computer, even if you're just
typing. We forget about it.
We're so used to it.
It seems natural, but it isn't.
It's all highly structured and
mediated.
But when you pick up a pencil,
and you go to a piece of paper-- or
chalk and a chalkboard I like even
better because then you can draw
really big and freely,
and you get your whole body
involved.
That frees up the
mind.
And I think, again,
it's not the only way to work, but
it's a different way to work.
We shouldn't ever get stuck in a
single channel because then
we forget about all the assumptions
and the constraints we're working
within. You need to keep breaking
out of those to stay fresh, I think.
Yeah. I mean, I wonder if you could
say a little bit about your
experience. I've read you writing
about your experience creating
the map that you created of-- I
think it was Gettysburg.
You've written about-- I mean, I'm
thinking here in particular of the
time and the slow length of
time in the kind of - I want to call
it - human investment that you made
to the maps that you created, which
is very different from, I think,
my own and most people's
understanding of what a map is.
There's a kind of objective reality
that we imagine a map to have.
But your experience in terms of your
own experience creating it, but then
also the end product is something
that's very different.
Yeah. And just the way you phrased
the question brings to mind how
most people who live with their
phones on all day and who
navigate by Google Maps,
I think, are
seeing maps more and more as just
a natural thing, that maps
are like words now, just
ordinary, everyday.
And you don't think about where they
come from or how they're made.
The map of Gettysburg that I made
began with a question.
I was brushing my teeth one morning.
I was living in Washington, D.C., at
the time, and honestly,
it just kind of popped into my head.
What could Lee see at
Gettysburg?
And I knew that there was a
GIS technique or method called
viewshed analysis
where you need some sort of
digital terrain surface,
we call it, that simulates
the landscape, and you place
yourself digitally on that landscape
at a certain point and ask the
computer to tell you, using
these elevation values, what could I
see and what could I not see from
this viewpoint?
It's kind of easy to picture how
this would work.
But how do you recreate the
battlefield of Gettysburg
as of July 1863?
What I found was a map in the
National Archives that
is an enormously detailed,
topographic map.
It shows contours
representing elevation heights
and the little valleys and
the glacial deposits and so forth.
And roads and
farmsteads and fences and
everything else.
And at that time,
there was no computer program
that would scan that map and
easily pick off the contour lines
because everything in the map was
black.
It would pick up everything.
It would pick up every house; it
would pick up every road.
And so I just decided I
would draw-- I would trace
the contours like a kindergartner
tracing an outline in an art class.
I spent most of a summer
listening to Mandy Patinkin
sing beautiful Broadway songs
and tracing the contours
of Gettysburg hours
and hours at a light table
with semi-transparent big
sheets of a plastic
called Mylar on top
of copies of this map from the
National Archives.
And I felt as if the ground
was entering my bones
through that process of tracing.
I learned the landscape
by heart.
I thought about it as I drew, but
not in a very intellectual
way, almost in a visceral way.
I kind of felt like I was slowly
walking up and down those
hills and valleys.
Then through a series of technical
processes,
those lines were brought
into a GIS program, and we could
finally ask the question, what could
Lee see?
But by tracing that landscape,
by the time I saw the maps
that showed in shadow what
he couldn't see and illuminated
what he could see, I felt
I deeply understood what that map
was showing me.
It became a personal experience,
and I have so many times recommended
that people find a way to draw.
I'm not an artist.
I can't draw your face
and make it look like you.
No, it sounds very artistic.
What you're describing, the process,
I mean, I just imagine that an
artist-- it would resonate with
someone in terms of like becoming--
the experience would resonate
with an artist even though-- I know
what you're saying, like as a
someone who can sit and like draw
realistically, maybe you can't do
that. But it sounds like an artistic
or an aesthetic experience that
you're describing.
Very much so.
And I think it's an emotional
experience.
And I am all for finding
ways
to bring feeling into scholarship.
Yeah. So,
yeah, I want to ask you another
question about kind of-- I think
this relates to kind of feeling and
scholarship, really, because
when you have done your work
with the Holocaust studies and
GIS and mapping and geography, in
particular, you've had some
people, when you've presented your
work, humanists in particular,
object that some of the human
element seems like it's missing.
And it's missing as you write
through what they see as a process
of abstraction.
So I wonder, you've talked a little
bit about inductive visualization
and some of the ways that you
work, I think,
against that process of abstraction
in mapmaking.
And so that it doesn't have to be a
kind of impersonal or cold or
abstract way of maps.
It doesn't have to have those
qualities.
I wonder how your
work with mapmaking,
and what results you've had
with that, and if you have presented
the work in ways that you think has
addressed that issue.
Oh, golly.
I keep trying, but I feel I
usually fall short.
It's a difficult
quest, actually, to bring
emotion to cartography.
And there are lots of people today
who are working on this problem,
including some very, very fine
professional cartographers.
Cartography in the digital
age has a certain
look that is
very crisp and polished.
Usually, we see fairly
sort of - we might even say -
professional colors.
They're not too bright.
They're not too brassy.
They're not too dark.
They are clear and scientific.
All of that works against emotion.
So
I would say I
have not personally ever made
a map that has the
deeply expressive qualities that
I would like. But some of the
students I've worked with have.
And one colleague in the
collaborative, a brilliant
cartographer and graphic
thinker, Erik Steiner,
has.
Maybe I could try to describe
Erik's most expressive map.
Sure. And we could-- you could tell
us what he did, but also, I think we
can link to it in the comments
that go with the-- or in the
description of the podcast.
So there will be a way for listeners
to see that.
But if you could talk about his
method and what he did to address
this issue, that'll be great.
Right. Well, Erik was working with
wonderful scholar Simone Gigliotti
and a man named Marc Masurovsky to
try to map evacuations
of women out of
Auschwitz camps.
This is in January 1945.
It was cold.
It was snowy.
These women had managed
to survive very difficult
circumstances.
But walking out
in a rush from the camp into the
snow was a pretty traumatic
experience.
And their testimony reflects that.
So how do you map that
kind of experience?
Women marching for several days
through the snow before they're
allowed any food or rest.
And they tried conventional
cartography. They made a map of the
route.
And it was a good map,
but it really didn't say anything,
except they started here, and they
ended there.
Erik was pondering this problem
one day, rolling
a piece of rope in his hands or
a thick string, and
he just kept working the string,
and it began to become
something in his hands.
And he worked it so hard in some
places it began to fray.
And then he was thinking about the
route of one particular group of
women that he'd studied the most
closely.
And then he laid the rope on a piece
of paper and realized that
he could make a map out of this
rope. And so he
added some color to the paper,
spots of red, where
one of the women in the group had
been shot, and her sister had
witnessed her murder and
found quotations from the testimony
that related to certain places they
pass through.
He took a picture of that, and then
he worked with it further in a
graphics program, and it became
a kind of visceral
picture of the route
and the women's experiences
with that string as
the route. But it's a physical
object, so it has a different
quality than that kind of scientific
computer cartography.
And that map, which he calls the
rope of history, was so inspiring
to us, and I think particularly to
me personally, that I
feel like now, for the rest of my
career, I will be chasing
the realization of
or the visualization of
the emotional realities
of the Holocaust in different ways.
There will be another rope map that
was one of a kind, but there will be
other one of the kinds that I hope
accomplish similar sort of goals.
Yeah, well, as I said, I can
link to an image of it, I think,
and also to some of your students'
work, which you've shown in some of
the writing that you've done.
I would say, just from having seen
it and even hearing you describe it
now, it also is something that looks
to me like it's an art project.
That's the way it comes out.
I think if you showed it to a number
of people, they might assume
that that's what it was first before
they assumed it was a map.
So it's a very interesting zone
I feel like you're working in that
does bridge that gap a bit.
And you write about how creative you
need to be in doing the kind
of cartography that you're
describing.
Well, and collaboration helps.
So Erik wouldn't have been able to
make that map without working with
Simone Gigliotti, who is a
specialist in the traumatic
experience of survivors.
And right now, I have
a sort of renewed collaboration
with an artist.
His name is Levi Westerfeld.
He is a
Dutch French cartographer
who's working in Norway, but he was
a student of mine at Middlebury
College.
In fact, it was working with him
that helped me come up with the idea
of inductive visualization.
Levi is a wonderful
portrait artist.
He does beautiful portraits right
now of
African refugees in Norway.
He has a show.
If you're in Arundel, Norway, you
can see Levy's portraits.
But he and I are working together to
try to find some new ways
to express
survivors journeys and experiences
in the Holocaust.
So these kinds of
really rich
collaborations with people who are
way outside your own field,
who have skills that you don't have.
I find one of the most exciting
things about this work.
And it seems like it also is
a work that-- I mean,
the collaborations that you're
talking about are one of the things
that enable it to produce
new knowledge about or experience
of or insights into this
kind of massive historical event,
the Holocaust.
Yes, a part of it is finding
creative collaborators with whom you
can be really honest.
You have to be able to say, "No,
that doesn't work," or "We're
not there yet." And
you have to be able to take
criticism as well as an important
part of the process.
I think the other thing that has
been a hallmark of
my group's effective ongoing
collaboration - we're entering our
second decade now
-is that we are
also honest about
what questions we haven't answered
yet.
So maybe
some people are just naturally
restless and always looking for the
next thing. But you can also
develop a research culture
where that's part of the work.
Okay, we've done this,
but what have we not done?
And that also means that you should
always be seeking new critics
and new audiences
because if your work matters,
it should be interesting to lots of
people. And the more people you
reach out to, the more different
kinds of responses you're going to
get. This all becomes part of
the generative creativity
of a long-term collaboration.
Right. Well,
I can end just by saying thanks so
much. I mean, it's exciting to me to
end to hear you looking forward to
more work with Holocaust studies
that you're doing. Because I think some
of the work that I've learned about
in preparing to talk with you is
really interesting and insightful
and beautiful.
And so we look forward to more.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, thanks.
That's it for this edition of Being
Human. This episode was produced by
Christian Snyder, Humanities Media
Fellow at the University of
Pittsburgh.
Stay tuned next time when my guest
will be Fred Moten, professor of
Performance Studies at NYU.
Thanks for listening.

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Being Human Podcast Recordings

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Title
The Art of Maps: An Interview with Anne Knowles
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Knowles, Anne Kelly (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
February 2, 2018
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0028
Description
An interview with Anne Knowles, McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine. The interview focuses on Professor Knowles's life and career, particularly her work with geographical information systems to examine a range of historical events and phenomena, including the Battle of Gettysburg, the American Iron Industry, and the Holocaust.
Extent
38 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Historical geography
Geographic information systems
Knowles, Anne Kelly
Geographic Subjects
United States
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

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The Art of Maps: An Interview with Anne Knowles

In collections