Posted by As an eternal student I love a good online course and currently, I am working through the Digital Humanities course at Harvard University which ties in with a major theme that I return to time and again on this blog, which is how technology changes the way we work, for good and for bad as it invents new jobs for us.
So far the course has presented me with lots of fabulous projects and the story they wanted to tell and how to keep it honest, as the visualisations may look really cool, but are they representative of the ‘truth’? – Whatever that may be, which ties in with trust and transparency.
One project, however, which really demonstrates how to explore and construct the notion of time and space within a given moment of history from all manner of seemingly random information is one by historian Professor Kelly O’Neill and the Russian Empire in the 19th century, her Imperiia Project.
O’Neill used various sources of analogue data from 19th century maps of Russia to a deck of illustrated cards rather like a Top Trumps guide. Each card had detailed information about each province from the major cities it contained to the ethnic groups living there and overall population. O’Neill took all of the information off the cards and entered it into a spreadsheet. She then took 59 old maps of the provinces and stitched them together. Then she overlay that onto today’s world maps using coordinates and tracing round the provinces so that she could mapwarp them together. She then cross-referenced that with the top trumps spreadsheet information to create a rich interactive representation of the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Anyone can go to the website and ask different and new questions of the historical geographical information system (GIS) that she has created.
Unconnected last night I went to a talk at the Royal Institute on The science of synaesthesia: Understanding our senses. The speaker, cognitive scientist Dr Mary Jane Spiller, has synaesthesia and said that normally 1 in 4 people have it. I went along with my daughter who has it, and so did many other people in the lecture theatre making the percentage of synaesthetes much higher than the usual 4%.
Spiller began by asking for a volunteer with synaesthesia to draw how time looks for them. One woman came up and drew like a snake-like line of months which stretched out into the distance at both ends, whilst she marked herself as the point of origin in August. Later on, Spiller presented a slide in which someone called Pat had a similar snake-like image, only that the snake connected itself, rather like the Ouroboros, the snake that eats itself, thus representing the endless cycle of life.
Spiller then asked non-synaesthetes, or as another synaesthete put it, the half-dead people in the room, how they imagined time and space. I don’t remember what the volunteers shouted out as there were several of them all speaking at once and Spiller suggested: Do you visualise your calendars from Google or Outlook? Which as a computer scientist I found very interesting as again, this shows us how technology has changed society and the way that we think about things, in this case, time.
Spiller said there was much study about synaesthesia last century but then it was dismissed or forgotten for a while as the field of cognitive science got going, and synaesthetes were dismissed when they described what they saw. Indeed, my daughter was sometimes told that she couldn’t possibly be seeing colours in numbers and letters as part of the effort to get her to conform.
Interestingly, the first volunteer who drew her snake calendar, (or was it someone else? There was a lot of cool imagery going on) said that her days of the week snake calendar began on a Monday. She has a British accent, so I was surprised as in the UK the week begins on a Sunday. But again, because we use a lot of technology designed in North America, we have adopted to their days of week starting on Monday. My reaction was ooh no that’s wrong which apparently is what many synaesthetes do when you present them with the colour of the number seven or the letter A. It makes them feel uncomfortable, like me starting my week on a Monday. My daughter was frowning a lot as there were a lot of ‘wrong’ colours on the alphabet and number slide.
Personally when I think about time, or when I visualise time, I think about Salvador Dalí‘s painting: The persistence of memory, or melting clocks, which is why I chose it as the picture (original source on Wikipedia) for this blogpost. For me, time is a social construct. I am not saying that there is isn’t a passage of time which leads to changes in us all including my sparkly grey hair, but as clocks were introduced to make trains run on time, keeping time does feel like many other things in society: A construct to organise and simplify the way we organise things – often in binary – and often to the detriment of a specific group of people, like the Lakota people in North and South Dakota, USA, who did not use clocks to measure time but when everyone else (aka the non-indigenous colonist-invaders) around them did, the Lakota were told that they were lazy and unreliable.
Time can be very flexible, especially when doing yoga or meditating, or when I dressed up as a vampire to hand out Halloween candy to the kids the other night. It felt simultaneously like five minutes and five million years ago since I used to go out trick or treating with mine who are now the same height as me. Equally so when I look further back in time to when I used to go as a child myself with a tealight in a turnip as part of the age-old ritual. So, I am not surprised that privately I think about the melting clocks, or when I roll out my yoga mat, I feel like I am all the versions of me I have ever been and yet to be at the still point of the turning world in moments of mindful appreciation.
On our way out, I was able to mention to Dr Spiller that as a non-synaesthete, I see Dali’s picture when I visualise time and she said that she would put it in her future talks. I was delighted which in turn has inspired me to tie together two blog series that I’ve not quite finished yet as I wasn’t sure, as is normal when I blog, where I am going and why I am blogging.
But now I have a bit of a vision myself of how to proceed to bend time and create new colourful visualisations and I just cannot wait to get started!
TL:DR, I’ve got you.
Watch the video below!
