CONCEPTUALIZING AND MAPPING GEOCULTURAL SPACE

JANE STADLER

Abstract This essay seeks to critically conceptualize the term geocultural
space and the emerging field of study with which it is associated by exploring
the various ways in which such space is currently being mapped by researchers
using digital humanities tools and methods. In drawing together intersecting
interests in Geographic Information Systems and spatio-cultural narratives
and experiences, this work defines an interdisciplinary field of research that
is gathering momentum as geolocative technologies that shape and reshape
the ways in which we perceive and experience the world become increasingly
prevalent in academic life and in the cultural mainstream.
Keywords: Geocultural space, Geographic Information Systems, digital
cartography

Since the ‘spatial turn’

1

in cultural theory in the late 1980s, Geographic

Information Systems (GIS) and Geographic Information Science are no longer
the preserve of geography departments; rather, digital mapping projects exist
within such otherwise disparate disciplines as literary and cultural studies,
history, health sciences, media studies and marine biology, to name just a
few. Many of these projects are either using digital mapping tools to engage
with notions of geocultural space or are creating digital artefacts that have
implications for the ways in which geographic and environmental spaces are
culturally understood. Although researchers undertaking digital mapping may
be based in institutes and faculties between which there is little opportunity
for dialogue or sharing ideas and techniques, GIS arguably establishes a bridge

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing

9.2 (2015): 133–141

DOI: 10.3366/ijhac.2015.0145
© Edinburgh University Press 2015
www.euppublishing.com/journal/ijhac

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between research in the sciences and the humanities. Interdisciplinary research
of this nature rests not only on shared research methods, it also necessitates
thinking through the implications of such work in terms of what geocultural
space is and how it may be conceptualized.

The concept of geocultural space has been taken up in fields as diverse as

theater and performance studies (Arntzen,

2

Gotman

3

), historical literary studies

(Kennedy

4

), civic performance art (Ortar

5

), political science (Singer

6

), studies of

education and immigration (Isik-Ercan

7

), international relations (Massey

8

) and

cultural geography. Scholars across these disciplines have defined geocultural
space variously as mapping cultural practices and attitudes onto the geographic
regions with which they are associated, or referring to a ‘sense of place’ that
encompasses the historical and cultural events and narratives associated with a
location.

In his article ‘Nuclear Proliferation and the Geocultural Divide,’ political

scientist David Singer refers to the geocultural divide as ‘the cleavage between
the geographically “North” or culturally Western and those who exist outside
that sphere.’

9

Here the term geocultural refers to the ways in which cultural

practices and attitudes can be connected with geographic places and regions
and the cultural concepts that accrue upon them, such as the Orient and
the Occident. This understanding of the geocultural is akin to the term
geopolitical, which refers to the influence of geography and demography on
politics, trade, and foreign policy. Scholars in different disciplines, such as
dramaturg Kélina Gotman, have adapted the term geocultural space from
cultural geography and use it to refer to an emotive or affective sense of place
that draws on notions of the past, the present, and belonging in relation to
the sites or locations in which cultural performances take place, such as the
Sydney Opera House.

The idea of geocultural space invites questions about varied conceptions of

space, and here I draw a distinction between physical places with geographic
coordinates and the more abstract notion of space, which may refer to the less
tangible dimensions of, for instance, sites on the Internet, or civic space. As
David Bodenhamer writes in ‘Narrating Place and Space,’ ‘most of the narratives
we construct focus not on space, an abstract geometrical concept, but rather on
place, the particular expression of geographical space. Humanists embrace the
concept of place because of its power in our individual and collective lives.’

10

Something like civic space doesn’t necessarily map neatly onto a geographic
place since, for instance, political debates may take place in televisual spaces that
interpenetrate the private spaces of domestic homes, yet such unbounded spaces
do have a physical dimension—a site like a town square or courthouse—that
informs their cultural significance. For example, in her book on geocultural space
in Twentieth-Century U.S. literature and culture Tanya Ann Kennedy argues that
spatial constructions of the public and private map onto the power relations

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of gender and class in ways that have historically affected women’s mobility
in public places as well as their ability to participate in political and cultural
life.

11

Kennedy’s invocation of history and culture reminds us that cultural space

introduces ambiguity to geographic mapping endeavors, and that space and
place also have temporal dimensions. Geographic places may alter markedly
over time or they may remain virtually unchanged for millennia; the same is
true for mythic spaces such as the Never-Never and the Dreamtime, to use two
Australian examples, and for understandings and uses of mediated spaces such
as cyberspace.

Geocultural space needs to be differentiated from its cousins, geographic

space and cultural space. The Great Barrier Reef, for instance, is a geographic
space that marine biologists at the University of Queensland Global Change
Institute are mapping in the innovative Catlin Seaview Project,

12

which uses

a submarine version of Google Street View to produce three dimensional
visualizations of the aquatic landscape. The reef is also a cultural space in that
the Seaview Project produces geovisualizations of the Reef for public view in
Google Earth, taking the Reef into the realm of culture. The Great Barrier Reef
is also a physical place where cultural practices such as scuba diving and tourism
occur and it holds a revered place in Australian culture associated with values
such as environmentalism and aspects of national identity such as the image
of the bronzed surf lifesaver. Additionally, it is an animated, representational
space where fish are our friends in Finding Nemo;

13

a frightening space where

sharks attack divers in movies like The Reef;

14

and a space where the memory of

Indigenous dispossession haunts coral atolls in the film Uninhabited.

15

Uninhabited

furnishes a rich example of geocultural space: the story is set in a

real place on the Great Barrier Reef known as Coral Island, yet this is not a place
that we ever see in the film because for logistical reasons the movie was shot at
Masthead Island nearer the coast. Coral Island is a fictional name that stands in
for the real island in the Coral Sea in order to protect it from an influx of tourists
and also to render it a symbolic space that represents the homeland of Indigenous
Australians. In the film an Aboriginal woman named Coral haunts the atoll and
uses her Indigenous bio-cultural knowledge to harness the power of the reef and
the poisonous stonefish that live there to wreak revenge on white colonists who
violated and dispossessed her. In the film, Coral Island is a geocultural space
that exists in relation to the actual location where the events that inspired the
film took place, the shooting location, and the spaces of narrative and historical
memory.

It is the form of geocultural space that is visualized in narrative representations

of location that Stephen Carleton, Peta Mitchell and I have investigated in
the Cultural Atlas of Australia,

16

a cultural heritage project that geolocates

the mediated spaces of Australian films, novels, and plays on an interactive
online map. This project locates the settings of cultural narratives that have

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geographic referents and annotates the map with the varied cultural and
geographic perspectives that accrue around each place over time. The geocultural
mapping endeavor that the Cultural Atlas instantiates grapples with ambiguity
and uncertainties such as fictional place names, symbolic spaces, and differences
between narrative settings and filming locations, but it is a form of cultural
mapping that relates directly to the physical landscape. In this sense the Cultural
Atlas of Australia has an affinity with other cultural mapping projects that build
on growing global interest in geovisualization including the Electronic Cultural
Atlas Initiative,

17

Hypercities,

18

and the Literary Atlas of Europe.

19

The conception of geocultural space that is explored in the Cultural Atlas of

Australia, which we have written about in Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing
Australian Spatial Narratives

,

20

is distinct from projects that map the locations

of cultural production and consumption. Successful examples of the latter kind
of projects include Robert Allen’s ‘Going to the Show,’

21

which documents

the history of moviegoing in North Carolina through maps, photographs, and
press clippings, and Richard Maltby and his colleagues’ work on ‘Mapping
the Movies: the Changing Nature of Australia’s Cinema Circuits and their
Audiences 1956–1984’ and ‘Only at the Movies? Mapping the Contemporary
Australian Cinema Market.’

22

As discussed below, findings from the latter

project are represented in this volume by Alwyn Davidson, Deb Verhoeven, and
Colin Arrowsmith’s article, ‘Petal Diagrams: A New Technique for Mapping
Historical Change in the Film Industry.’

Another project in Canada seeks to bring these different types of movie maps

together: Sébastien Caquard, a geographer at Concordia University, examines
the technological, artistic and scientific frontiers of cinematic cartography.

23

Caquard’s Cybercartographic Atlas of Canadian Cinema aims to investigate
the different territories of Canadian Cinema including the territories of film
production (studios and post-production facilities), film distribution (theatre
locations), and film action (narrative settings and shooting locations). Through
an analysis of the interrelationships between these territories in contemporary
Canadian film, Caquard’s research seeks to sketch the contours of an emerging
postnational geography of Canada.

Drawing together these different understandings of geocultural space, we

might think of it as the ways in which geographic places are associated with
cultural practices, knowledge, attitudes and feelings, power structures, and
stories that locate people in relation to each other and the natural and built
environment. This working definition excludes non-geographic spaces such as
the Internet. It also excludes powerful geocultural spaces that have only a
fictional or attenuated relationship to geographical places, such as JR Tolkien’s
Middle Earth as well as projects like genomic mapping. However, even highly
mediated spaces, mythic narrative spaces, and microscopic spaces often call to
mind actual physical geographies or have a human component that enables us to

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Conceptualizing and Mapping Geocultural Space

locate them in relation to the people involved and the places where those people
live or work. For example, Tolkien reputedly wrote part of Lord of the Rings
at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, drawing inspiration from the
physical geography of the Western Cape and the cultural tensions between light
and dark-skinned peoples in that region.

The contributors to this journal issue have taken up the term geocultural

space and applied it in various disciplinary contexts and cartographic initiatives.
The articles offer critical, theoretically grounded accounts of digital humanities
research projects that are either using interactive cartography to engage with
notions of geocultural space or creating digital artefacts and utilizing research
infrastructures that have implications for the ways in which geographic and
environmental spaces are culturally understood.

Like the work undertaken in the Cultural Atlas of Australia, the articles in

this collection that engage with movie mapping use a methodology Richard
Maltby refers to as ‘new cinema history.’ When Maltby asks ‘How can Cinema
History Matter More?’ in his article about the ‘issues involved in writing
historical studies of cinema that are not centrally about films,’ his interest is
in studying the history of film reception and bringing it into dialogue with
other disciplines.

24

Davidson, Verhoeven and Arrowsmith worked with Maltby

on his aforementioned cinema mapping projects. Their ‘Petal Diagrams’ article
is a case study of cinema venues in Melbourne between 1946 and 1986 that
geovisualizes historical and spatial changes changes to cinema operations in
a single diagram that records shifting exhibition and distribution patterns of
films across both time and space as the ownership of cinema venues alters and
the number of screens change. Like Chris Brennan-Horley’s work (discussed
below), this mapping work harnesses the power of GIS to take account of
changes to services such as road and rail networks, and associated changes in
demographics and mobility.

While each has a different focus and goals, the articles contributed by

Christian B. Long and by Maria A. Vélez-Serna and John Caughie follow
Maltby’s lead in advocating an historical study that is grounded in film culture
and cinematic texts without being centred on the analysis of films themselves.
In ‘Remote Locations: Early Scottish Scenic Films and Geo-databases,’ Vélez-
Serna and Caughie map the setting and location of early non-fiction films set
in Scotland, examining the relationship between film marketing, tourism, and
more local perceptions of place. They found that the sublime wildness of the
Scottish Highlands, as represented in early cinema’s scenic motion pictures,
is an exotic image of Scotland that is produced for a foreign market whereas
films produced for consumption by Scottish residents tended to be local topical
pictures that represented familiar, everyday, recognisable and accessible locales.
Like Vélez-Serna and Caughie, Long draws upon Franco Moretti’s ‘distant
reading’ approach to map shifting concepts of the nation in a national cinema.

25

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Jane Stadler

In ‘Where is France in French Cinema, 1976–2013?’ Long traces the production
of an image of France and Frenchness through the locations in which French
films intended for domestic, critical, and international consumption are set.
His movie location maps geovisualize patterns in location choice in order to
defamiliarize received understandings of film history over a forty-year period.
He argues ‘the maps reveal a nation’s spatial organization on film and point to
avenues to pursue in research, showing how a geospatial approach can enable,
direct, and redirect the critical construction of what particular spaces comprise
the national in national cinema.’

Marko Juvan and Joh Dokler’s cartographic analysis of the space of Slovenian

literary culture, ‘Towards a GIS Analysis of Literary Cultures: The Making of the
Slovenian Ethnoscape Through Literature,’ has an affinity with work mentioned
earlier by Barbara Piatti, Lorenz Hurni and colleagues on the Literary Atlas of
Europe. In different ways, these literary geography projects map the interactions
between real and fictional geographies. By mapping spaces and places in
literary texts, the Literary Atlas of Europe makes use of interactive cartography
as a tool to interpret the history of Europe’s literary heritage. Similarly, the
geocultural mapping project that Juvan leads, ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary
Culture,’ demonstrates that works of literature and the landscapes that they
contain provide spatial representations that help to configure and give meaning
to actual places. As they trace literature’s relationship to the formation of the
Slovenian nation, Juvan and Dokler demonstrate that Slovenian literary culture
and literary representation are, in turn, shaped both by the physical environment
and by changing socio-cultural practices. Juvan and Dokler argue that just
as Slovenian literature is informed by the country’s geospatial conditions, the
practices, institutions, media, and memorials of Slovenia’s literary culture have
also played a significant role in shaping the geographic and cultural landscape
and perceptions of its social and ideological meaning.

The other literary mapping project represented in this volume focuses on

a particular author’s oeuvre, rather than a national literary landscape. While
Charles Travis leads the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland cultural cartography
project, his contribution to this special journal issue focuses on mapping the
poetry and prose inspired by Samuel Beckett’s walks when he was a student
at Trinity College Dublin in order to visualize Beckett’s affective experience
of place. Furthermore, Travis argues that in spatial stories such as Murphy,
Beckett’s representation of his protagonist’s perception of London undercuts
Cartesian understandings of space and associated conceptions of the self as a
rational thinking subject. More broadly, Travis’s article, ‘Acts of Perception:
Samuel Becket, Time, Space and the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland,
1922–1949

,’ demonstrates how contemporary digital tools and research methods

such as interactive digital cartography facilitate geocultural research. Along
with GPS-enabled mobile computing technologies, the computational analysis

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Conceptualizing and Mapping Geocultural Space

and geovisualization of cultural patterns that interactive Literary Atlases, Movie
Maps and Cultural Atlases enable allow digital humanities scholars to generate
new modes of surveying, perceiving, experiencing, and interpreting geographic
and cultural landscapes that are, as Travis points out, akin to the affective spatial
narratives and representations Beckett produced in his much earlier exploration
of Dublin and London.

Where Beckett’s Murphy might be considered something of a flâneur in his

exploration of geocultural space, Chris Brennan-Horley’s contribution to this
journal tackles a more contemporary form of spatial mobility by extending his
previous work on the geography of cultural life in which he has mapped the
spaces of creative production in locations such as Darwin.

26

In this volume,

‘Maps and Mobilities: On the Possibilities and Limits of Spatial Technologies
for Humanities Research’ focuses on mapping geocultural practices rather
than cultural narratives or the production of representations. Brennan-Horley
combines interviews with and anecdotes from local residents in Australia’s
Bega Valley region with historical GIS mapping to document the sealing of
roads over time. He investigates whether spatial network analysis is capable
of providing insights into ‘bitumen’s capacity for time-space convergence,’
which is a wonderful way of characterizing changes in travel time as road
networks are sealed. Brennan-Horley found that gaining insight into the cultural
dimensions of driving and drivers’ subjective views of the terrain provides a
more cohesive geocultural understanding of historical mobilities and perceptions
of time, space and distance in relation to changes to a road network as dirt
roads are progressively sealed with bitumen. This work explores how changing
road conditions affect driving practices and experiences or understandings of
safety, time constraints, vehicle type, vehicle wear and tear, dust, and weather
conditions. As Brennan-Horley writes, ‘attitudes toward dirt and bitumen roads
were revealed, including routing choices and driving behaviours made in
response to differing surfaces and how driving practices become shaped by a
lifetime of experiences behind the wheel.’

Together, this collection of articles advances understandings of how locative

media and geospatial technologies may be used in humanities and arts research
to develop layered and multi-perspectival representations of geocultural spaces
and dynamic ways of virtually exploring and interpreting such spaces as
geography and culture inform and interpenetrate one another.

acknowledgments

This research was supported by a University of Queensland International Collaboration Award
used to sponsor a visit by David Bodenhamer and a workshop on Mapping Geocultural Space
co-hosted by Jane Stadler and Peta Mitchell, 8–9 August 2013.

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Jane Stadler

end notes

1

Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory,
(London: Verso, 1989).

2

Knut Ove Arntzen, ‘Post-mainstream as a Geocultural Dimension for Theatre,’
(http://www.inst.at/trans/5Nr/arntzen.htm, 1998).

3

Kélina Gotman, ‘The Dancing-place: Towards a Geocultural and Geohistorical Theory of
Performance Space,’ Choreographic Practices 3 no.1 (2012): 7–23.

4

Tanya Ann Kennedy, ‘Keeping Up Her Geography’: Women’s Writing and Geocultural Space
in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

(New York: Routledge, 2014).

5

Ilana Salama Ortar, ‘My Concept: Geo-cultural, Historical, Political Site-specific
Artworks,’ Geo-cultural Historical Political < http://www.ilanasalama.com/2010/04/geo-
cultural-historical-political-site.html > , 2012.

6

David Singer, ‘Nuclear Proliferation and the Geocultural Divide: The March of Folly,’
International Studies Review

9 (2007): 663–672.

7

Zeynep Isik-Ercan, ‘Third Spaces: Turkish Immigrants and Their Children at the Intersection
of Identity, Schooling, and Culture,’ Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education: Studies
of Migration, Integration, Equity, and Cultural Survival

, 8 no. 3 (2014): 127–144.

8

Justin Massie and David Morin, ‘Francophonie and Peace Operations: Towards Geocultural
Ownership,’ International Journal: Canada’s Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 68 no. 3
(2013): 479–500.

9

Singer, ‘Nuclear Proliferation and the Geocultural Divide,’ 663.

10

David Bodenhamer, ‘Narrating Place and Space,’ in Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives, eds
David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2015), 8.

11

Kennedy, ‘Keeping Up Her Geography,’ 6.

12

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, ‘Catlin Seaview Project,’ University of Queensland Global Change
Institute, < http://www.gci.uq.edu.au/xl-catlin-seaview-survey > accessed 12 July 2015.

13

Finding Nemo

, directed by Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich (2003), DVD.

14

The Reef

, directed by Andrew Traucki (2010), DVD.

15

Uninhabited

, directed by Bill Bennett (2010), DVD.

16

Jane Stadler, Stephen Carleton and Peta Mitchell, ‘Cultural Atlas of Australia,’ University of
Queensland < http://australian-cultural-atlas.info/ > 2011–2014.

17

Lewis Lancaster and Michael Buckland, ‘Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative,’ University of
California, Berkeley < http://www.ecai.org/ > accessed 12 July 2015.

18

Tod Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano, ‘Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the
Digital Humanities,’ University of California, Los Angeles < http://www.hypercities.
com/ > accessed 12 July 2015.

19

Barbara Piatti and Lorenz Hurni, ‘Literary Atlas of Europe,’ Institute of Cartography and
Geoinformation, Zurich < http://www.literaturatlas.eu/en > accessed 12 July 2015.

20

Jane Stadler, Peta Mitchell and Stephen Carleton, Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing
Australian Spatial Narratives

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).

21

Robert Allen, ‘Going to the Show: Mapping Moviegoing in North Carolina,’ University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill < http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/ > accessed 12 July 2015.

22

Richard Maltby, Jill Julius Matthews, and Mike Walsh, ‘Mapping the Movies: the Changing
Nature of Australia’s Cinema Circuits and their Audiences 1956–1984,’ Flinders University
<

http://auscinemas.flinders.edu.au/ > accessed 12 July 2015; Kate Bowles, Richard Maltby,

Deb Verhoeven, Colin Arrowsmith, Bronwyn Simone Coate, Alwyn Davidson, ‘Only at

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Conceptualizing and Mapping Geocultural Space

the Movies? Mapping the Contemporary Australian Cinema Market,’ Deakin University,
2012–2014.

23

Sébastien Caquard, ‘The Cybercartographic Atlas of Canadian Cinema,’ Concordia
University, < http://www.atlascine.org > accessed 12 July 2015.

24

Richard Maltby, ‘How can Cinema History Matter More?’ Screening the Past, 22 (2007):
http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/22/board-richard-maltby.html

25

Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013).

26

Chris Gibson, Chris Brennan-Horley and Andrew Warren. ‘Geographic Information
Technologies for Cultural Research: Cultural Mapping and the Prospects of Colliding
Epistemologies,’ Cultural Trends 19 no.4 (2010): 325–348.

141