Ces deux cartes pour vous inciter à jeter un coup d'oeil sur le passionnant site "The Spatial History Project" de la Stanford University dont tout le travail de réflexions et de recherches est axé sur les nouvelles façons de visualiser l'histoire à travers l'aménagement et l'occupation des espaces.
Voilà comment son directeur, l'historien Richard White, présente le travail du département dans un récent texte titré "What is Spatial History ?"
The Spatial History Project at Stanford is part of a larger spatial turn in history. It is a humble —if demanding and expensive— attempt to do history in a different way. I want to emphasize humble. Most so-called “turns” in history emphasize their revolutionary intent. I think that what we are doing is different, but we are not announcing the end of history as you know it or the extinction of the text or the narrative. Historians will continue to write books. Historians will continue to tell stories.
The Spatial History Project, however, does operate outside normal historical practice in five ways.
First, our projects are collaborative. Many of the things that visitors to our web site see involve collaborations between an historian, graduate students and undergraduates, geographers, GIS and visualization specialists, data base architects, and computer scientists. The scholars involved in the Spatial History Project can write books by themselves, but they cannot do a spatial history project on the scale they desire alone: we lack the knowledge, the craft, and ultimately the time.
Second, while many of our presentations involve language and texts, our main focus is on visualizations, and by visualizations I mean something more than maps, charts, or pictures.
Third, these visualizations overwhelmingly depend on digital history. By digital history all I mean is the use of computers. Digital history allows the exploitation of kinds of evidence and data bases that would be too opaque or too unwieldy to use without computers. It is all the stuff that we cannot narrate, or at least narrate without losing our audience. All historians run across such evidence in the archive. We look at them and toss them aside. For me railroad freight rate tables are the quintessential example.
Fourth, these projects are open-ended: everything —both tools and data— becomes part of a scholarly commons to be added to, subtracted from, reworked and recombined.
The final, and most critical aspect of our departure from professional norms is our conceptual focus on space.
Parmi les nombreux projets sur lesquels travaillent les étudiants (voir là), je ne résiste pas à vous présenter ci-dessous "The Central Pacific and Transcontinental Eleven Step: How to Run a Transcontinental Railroad". C'est pas forcément le projet le plus représentatif, mais c'est un petit bijou de clarté et de pédagogie sur le rôle des chemins de fer dans la croissance de la Californie à la fin du XIX° siècle.
Cette façon de raconter l'histoire, j'avoue que je rêverai de la voir appliquer sur l'excellent " Nature's Metropolis - Chicago and the Great West " de William Cronon, qui décrit de façon magistrale comment Chicago, via le fer, a pris peu à peu le contrôle de tout le marché de la viande aux Etats-Unis. C'est passionnant et cela explique en partie cela.
