April 15, 2024
This is Part 1 of the blog post series From History Book Index to Digital Database, where I take you on a tour of my experience turning the index of a physical, print history book into a digital spreadsheet that can be used to create data visualizations and explore historical questions. For an overview of the series, check out the introduction at From History Book Index to Digital Database.
In winter of 2023, I took a course called Mapping the World Before Mercator with Professor Victoria Morse. One assignment aimed to give students practice at working with quantitative evidence in a historical context. Students could either examine how an academic history article used quantitative methods, or they could try gathering some form of quantitative data for themselves to study a map-related question.
I chose the second option. Victoria guided me towards Robert Karrow’s Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and their Maps1, which is a door stopper of an academic text that contains short biographies of 80 sixteenth century European mapmakers.
Importantly for me, Karrow assigned a reference ID to each map by each mapmaker. In addition, he meticulously listed these maps in 3 different indexes in the back of the book: a general index, which is what you typically think of as a book index; an index where the maps are organized by the city where they were published; and an index where the maps are organized by the year in which they were published.
For the class assignment, I wanted to study where mapmakers were most active in the sixteenth century, and what that might tell me. Since I was curious about location, I looked at the index organized by publication city.
At a first glance, there are clearly patterns in this index organized by place. Antwerp, Paris and Venice each take up roughly a column, and there are only about 7 columns total in the index. Some countries, like Austria and England, only have a few entries across all cities.
Eyeballing the index gave me a very rough idea of the centers of mapmaking activity, but to get a little more information, I manually counted the number of first edition maps published per city. I ended up counting around 300 things, and storing this information in a little spreadsheet with one row for each of the 37 cities. This took an hour or two, which was quite reasonable as part of a small essay assignment.
I plotted this data on a (modern day) map, which allowed me to visually see more patterns than I could pick out from skimming the index. Looking at the map, I can see a diagonal axis across Western Europe where the major centers of map production are. I can also more easily identify anomalies: Braşov, Romania looks like an outlier, and I expected at least some maps from Spain and Portugal. This is where the heart of the history questions come in. The data cannot tell me why any of the patterns appeared. All of the maps that Karrow cataloged were by mapmakers included in Abraham Ortelius’s (1527-98) first atlas. Is the concentration of maps in northwest Europe simply a result of proximity to Ortelius in Antwerp? From class, I knew that there was cartography going on in Spain. Is this evidence that there was little communication between Spain and these more northern mapmakers? And what is going on with Braşov?
For the course assignment, I was limited in scope. There is only so much history that I can discuss in a few pages of writing. But I was also limited by the format of the data. My method of counting first edition maps by city sufficed for the questions I was asking, but other questions would benefit from different data. For example, if I wanted to learn about the trends of mapmaking over the decades of the sixteenth century, I could have instead counted maps in the index that is organized by year.
But what if I wanted to look at trends over time and location? From my map above, were some of the centers like Venice, Antwerp and Paris more prominent in the first half of the sixteenth century, or the second half? To examine questions like these, I (or any other student) would need a lot more data. It was relatively easy to count how many maps fell into each of thirty-some categories, but to look at multiple factors, I would need to record information about each map, one at a time.
A challenge! I was intrigued. There were so many other questions I could ask, visualizations I could make, if only I didn’t have to transcribe information about a thousand maps from this paper book into a spreadsheet. The more I thought about it, the more that I felt like there must be a way to turn these indexes from a paper book into a spreadsheet, so that I or future students could more easily ask questions like, what are the trends over time and space? Were maps of the whole world published in different locations than maps of cities? Did each mapmaker primarily publish maps in their home city?
As a curious Carleton student, it crossed my mind that this might be a topic for an independent study project for Victoria. It took a lot of courage to work myself up to set up an appointment to ask. I doubted I was qualified – I am a math major, and this was my first history course at college. I was uncertain if the project would be interesting to Victoria – maybe this is something she had already thought about. After all, she has given this assignment in previous years of this course. I felt like it might be too big of an ask – presumably Victoria already has a lot on her plate as a professor, and I am not a student in her department.
But I asked anyway, and Victoria was excited about the idea! We set up an independent study that began in Winter Term 2024. The project is interdisciplinary, and falls under the umbrella of digital humanities. It did not matter that I am not a history major, because part of the spirit of liberal arts is following curiosity, asking questions and seeking out collaboration, no matter the discipline.
In the next blog post in this series, I will explain how the goal of my independent study started off focused on making data visualization easier for future students, but shifted once we realized that actually getting the data from the index of a paper book into a spreadsheet is the more novel problem. Then, I will talk about some of the challenges and discoveries that came up along the way, from scanning devices to difficult-to-read fonts to the importance of punctuation.
- Karrow, Robert W. 1993. Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps. Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press. ↩︎