visualising knowledge: the newzealandhistorical …19… · the map represents none other than the...

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CopYJ:ight of Full Text rests with the original owner and, except as pennitted under the Act 968, copying this copyright material !s the pennission of the owner or Its lIcensee or agent or by way ofa licence from Copynght Agency Limited. For infonnation such licences contact Copyright Agency L,mIted on (02) 93947600 (ph) or (02) 93947601 VISUALISING KNOWLEDGE: THE NEW ZEALAND HISTORICAL ATLAS, GIS AND PRINT CULTURE SYDNEY J. SHEP Surely this is exactly what makes a unicorn's horri so mysterious. While its origin might lie in a whale's tooth, its significance depends upon another consideration altogether, namely, that of interpretation. The map represents none other than the transformation of a whale's tooth into a unicorn's horn. The craftsman's task is to extract a form from what has been given to him, and to make of it something that appeals to the heart as well as the mind.! On 3 November 1997, the long-awaited New Zealand Historical Atlas / Ko Papatuanuku e Yakoto Nei was launched to an eager and responsive public. Heralded as a publishing and scholarly landmark, the A tlas was immediately elevated to taonga or national treasure status. It was billed, along with The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and The Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English, as one of the most influential print products of the late twentieth century in defining and redefining what it means to be a New Zealander. To date, the Atlas has garnered a number of prestigious prizes: the inaugural 'Readers' Choice Award' from the 1998 Montana New Zealand Book Awards; the 1998 Book Data New Zealand Booksellers' Choice; and an award from GP Print for the best use of illustrations in a New Zealand book. It has sold over 20,000 copies, been reprinted twice, and remains consistently in the top ten New Zealand non-fiction books. With highly innovative cartographic design, the use of digital technologies, and a synthesis of physical and cultural landscapes over time and space, this masterwork of historical geography is uncontested. Over the last eighteen months, however, the steady stream of superlatives has been tempered by questions which reveal an essential unease with the nature of graphic representation and its manifestation in the conceptual framework, the process of content selection, and the visual display of information in the Atlas. Are comments such as 'what a mess' or 'graphical obfuscation' or 'too many diagrams, charts and tables, and toO many of them seemed overloaded' or 'does the Emperor have no clothes?' merely the rhetorical posturing of a responsible reviewer or do they point to something more 1. James Cowan, A Mapmaker's Dream. The Meditations oJ Pra Mauro, Carto- grapher to the Court oJ Venice (Sydney: Random House Australia, 1997), p.lIO-ll1. BSANZ Bulletin v.23 no.l, 1999,46-56

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Page 1: VISUALISING KNOWLEDGE: THE NEWZEALANDHISTORICAL …19… · The map represents none other than the transformation of a whale's tooth into a unicorn's horn. The craftsman's task is

CopYJ:ight of Full Text rests with the originalowner and, except as pennitted under theAct 968, copying this copyright material

!s the pennission of the owner orIts lIcensee or agent or by way of a licencefrom Copynght Agency Limited. For infonnation

such licences contact Copyright AgencyL,mIted on (02) 93947600 (ph) or (02) 93947601(fax)

VISUALISING KNOWLEDGE:THE NEW ZEALAND HISTORICAL ATLAS,

GIS AND PRINT CULTURE

SYDNEYJ. SHEPSurely this is exactly what makes a unicorn's horri so mysterious.While its origin might lie in a whale's tooth, its significance dependsupon another consideration altogether, namely, that of interpretation.The map represents none other than the transformation of a whale'stooth into a unicorn's horn. The craftsman's task is to extract a formfrom what has been given to him, and to make of it something thatappeals to the heart as well as the mind.!

On 3 November 1997, the long-awaited New Zealand Historical Atlas / KoPapatuanuku e Yakoto Nei was launched to an eager and responsive public.Heralded as a publishing and scholarly landmark, the A tlas was immediatelyelevated to taonga or national treasure status. It was billed, along with TheDictionary of New Zealand Biography and The Oxford Dictionary of NewZealand English, as one of the most influential print products of the latetwentieth century in defining and redefining what it means to be a NewZealander. To date, the Atlas has garnered a number of prestigious prizes:the inaugural 'Readers' Choice Award' from the 1998 Montana NewZealand Book Awards; the 1998 Book Data New Zealand Booksellers'Choice; and an award from GP Print for the best use of illustrations in aNew Zealand book. It has sold over 20,000 copies, been reprinted twice, andremains consistently in the top ten New Zealand non-fiction books.With highly innovative cartographic design, the use of digital

technologies, and a synthesis of physical and cultural landscapes over timeand space, this masterwork of historical geography is uncontested. Over thelast eighteen months, however, the steady stream of superlatives has beentempered by questions which reveal an essential unease with the nature ofgraphic representation and its manifestation in the conceptual framework,the process of content selection, and the visual display of information in theAtlas. Are comments such as 'what a mess' or 'graphical obfuscation' or 'toomany diagrams, charts and tables, and toO many of them seemedoverloaded' or 'does the Emperor have no clothes?' merely the rhetoricalposturing of a responsible reviewer or do they point to something more

1. James Cowan, A Mapmaker's Dream. The Meditations oJ Pra Mauro, Carto-grapher to the Court oJ Venice (Sydney: Random House Australia, 1997), p.lIO-ll1.

BSANZ Bulletin v.23 no.l, 1999,46-56

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unsettling, something which the Atlas, despite the refrain that it should besitting in every home and school, has catalysed yet failed to answer? As oneof the more recent critics provocatively phrased the problem: 'even with theaid of the latest computer software, visual images do not conveyinformation adequately, unless applied to appropriate subjects; ... visualimages are inherently incapable of communicating complex historicalprocesses and arguments.'2 In the following, I will argue that both thesuccess and failure of the New Zealand Historical A tlas can be attributed toits position in straddling two communication technologies. Produced in theprint world, executed according to the laws of the digital world, the Atlas isa homeless hybrid, gesturing towards the future, bound in the past,replicating the incunabular dilemma of living in both manuscript and printworlds, yet realising the potential of neither. I'll then look at a new digitalinitiative based in Canada using geographic information systems (GIS),which is poised to resolve this dilemma and introduce a trans-Tasmanproject which could revolutionise the study of print culture and bookhistory in this hemisphere.When the New Zealand Historical Atlas was launched, few reviewers were

slow to pick up on its subtitle: 'Visualising New Zealand.' How was thisdone in a print medium? lan Wards, editor of. the earlier New ZealandAtlas,) claimed that 'the aim has been an even balance between cartographicexposition, textual explanation and photographic illustration, eachcomplementary to the other.' Print technology, design conventions, and thereading habits of the 70s all meant, for the most part, a discrete separation oftext, maps and photographs. These isolated discourses contrast dramaticallywith the self-contained, plate by plate fusion of content, media, andtechniques of the 1997 Historical Atlas. Each of the 100 double-page spreadsis evidence of a very symptomatic 90s approach to design faciliated by'technological versatiliry and cartographic innovation.'4 Map projectionsdevised to emphasise interpretive perspective are overlaid with proportionalbar graphs and pie charts, three-dimensional block and flow diagrams,histograms and line graphs. Text, subtext, quotes and notes are integratedinto the plate design. Photographs, paintings, drawings, and other historical

2. Miles Fairburn, 'Computer Cartography', in New Zealand Books, 8(3), August1998, p.9. The other reviews quoted are: Owen Wilkes in Archaeology in NewZealand, 40(4), December 1997, p.312; John Overton in New Zealand Geographic,54(1), April 1998, p.56; Erik Olssen in People's History, no.27, March 1998, p.7; andFairburn, p.8.

3. Ian·Wards, ed., New Zealand Atlas (Wellington: Government Printing Office,1976), p.vii.

4. Malcolm McKinnon, ed., New Zealand Historical Atlas (Auckland: DavidBateman Ltd., & Department of Internal Affairs, i997), p.9.

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print artifacts offer snapshots to punctuate the illusion of three-dimensionality. No one communication medium is privileged as the eyenavigates through space and time in arcs, circles and diagonals, led byarrows, colours, and fonts. This almost super-saturated visual solution tohistoriography can be summed up in one word: multimedia.On the face of the Atlas's two-dimensional print page, this multimedia

design approach can be confusing to the uninitiated reader. For thecomputer literate, such design would be immediately recognisable and easilymanipulable - were it presented in the electronic domain. Without theability to 'click here', however, the print reader is forced to makeconnections manually, as it were, using clues and cues found on the page aswell as in the meta-informational apparatus of table of contents, index,bibliography, notes, and introductions. Moreover, in the absence of thehierarchical layering of information implicit in hypertext design, this Atlasrequires a level of sophisticated interaction, and at times considerable pre-knowledge, to navigate and contextualise. Editor Malcolm McKinnon usesthe metaphor of the journey to describe this new way of reading whichrequires 'people looking, literally, in a different way.'5 The language of thisjourney of interpretation is called 'navigation', which is also, significantly,the language of adventure in the digital domain. Reviewers, consciously ornot, slid into similar rhetoric and talked about 'browsing' strategies and'bites' (read 'bytes'?) of information. Contributors talked about the'interactive' exercise between scholars and cartographers. McKinnon alongwith his co-producers Russell Kirkpatrick and Barry Bradley obviouslyrecognised the latent difficulties in this new approach and devised a help-desk as an extended 'legend' for the work. Before and after publication, thedouble-page spread entitled 'How to Use the New Zealand Historical Atlas'6was increasingly supplemented by articles, lectures and educational packetswhich explained to the Atlas's purponedly general audience how to read thisnew graphic artifact.While the print output may initially be confusing, the A tlas is not

offering anything radically different in terms of the principles of selectivity,generalisation and standardisation underpinning all cartographic enterprise.Nor does it claim to be anything but an interpretive document. RayHargreaves and Brad Patterson, two long-standing New Zealand experts inthe geographic, canographic and archival fields, emphasise that maps arecommunication media which offer a conventionalised picture of the world

s. Quoted in 'A new slant on how we see ourselves', Evening Past, October 14,1997, p.5.

6. New Zealand Historical Atlas, pp.16-17.

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which is often a reflection of the mapmaker's perception of reality.? This'reality' is filtered and conditioned by the mapmaker's process of selectionand organisation of information as well as the technological tools availableto create and transmit that information clearly, legibly, and in multiples.Furthermore, this representation of reality is influenced by styles, trends,fads and fashions of the historical moment in which s/he is situated. As aresult, maps are interpretive documents which rely upon a readerconversant in the language of representation.Cartographic language can be as simple as a raft of internationally

recognised visual symbols explained textually in a legend or key situated atthe margins; or, it can be the standard and not so standard cartographic-specific formats of projections, whether oblique image, logarithmic, satellite,aerial, or digital terrain. Furthermore, as the Atlas demonstrates in spades, itcan be a fully constructed graphic document which presents alpha-numericlanguage in a highly charged visual format: bar-graphs, pie-charts, linegraphs, proportional circles, histograms, three-dimensional blockrenderings, flow diagrams. These foundational elements of cartographicgrammar have evolved to assist in the recording of spatial information andrelationships. They are also of preeminent importance in recording changethrough time, a fusion of the historical and geographical.Michael Twyman uses the term 'lexivisual' to describe nineteenth-

century developments in the visual representation of information.8Previously and clumsily, the text-driven formats of Ramusian charts andLinnaean lists were products of hand-compositional praerice and letterpressprinting technology. With the invention of pictorial processes such aslithography and photo-mechanical reproduerion, along with wood- andsteel-engraving, text and image could be integrated easily, economically, andquickly. Coupled with the need to produce an ever-increasing quantity ofeducational materials, knowledge was reconceptualised in a thematically-driven visual format. The genre of the atlas popularised this lexivisualapproach with bestsellers such as Playfair's Commercial and political atlas(1798 and later editions), Bacon's popular atlas of the world (1894), andHarmondsworth's atlas and gazeteer (1905). Presenting information

7. See R.P. Hargreaves, 'Maps and Plans as Research Tools', New ZealandMapkeepers' Circle 9 (December 1980), pp.3-11 and Brad Pauerson, 'Maps and Plans:A Neglected Archival Resource?' A rchives andManuscripts: A New Zealand Seminar,ed. Richard S. Hill & MD.W. Hodder, (Wellington: New Zealand LibraryAssociation, 1977), pp.SO-67.

8. Michael Twyman, 'The emergence of the graphic book in the 19th century',A Millennium of the Book. Production, Design & Illustration in Manuscript & Print900·1900, ed. Robin Myers & Michael Harris (Winchester & Delaware: St. Paul'sBibliographies & Oak Knoll Books, 1994), pp.US-180.

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graphically in ways which were essentially non-visual went hand-in-handwith new non-linear strategies of reading. Maps, of course, had beenmarching through this territory for centuries.The New Zealand Historical Atlas combines the principles of

conventional cartography with the lexivisual imperative. It foregrounds, asnever before, the process of reading, and makes explicit those implicitassumptions which govern our spatial and temporal organisation ofknowledge. The Atlas also shocks us into what the Canadian painter EmilyCarr would term 'fresh seeing"! of a landscape rich in historical presence,offering literally new perspectives to shake us out of our visual andintellectual complacency and/or ignorance. The editorial board was acutelyaware of their departure from traditional mapmaking and explained in theirnotes to contributors that 'the atlas will be nothing unless it is thecartographic realisation of your concepts. The use of four colours, unusualprojections which bring out the significant points and fresh ways of realisingthe graphic potential of your material should be pressed as far as possible:the graphic tools available do have great potential. It is the contributor's taskto supply data and concepts in a fashion that realises this potential.'lo Theambiguity of 'fashion' notwithstanding, the conjunction of technology andknowledge, where subject matter dictates form and is an extension of it, andthe opportunity given to scholars to rethink their approach to-concepts, wasunique: 'The Atlas is an adventure in scholarship, not an encyclopedia of thewell-known.'1lContributors rose to the challenge. Based upon the premise that readers

will remember a story more readily than facts, contributors were asked toconceptualise their thoughts by making a judicious selection of appropriatematerial (both textual and graphical), which could then be presented as avisual narrative. Fact and detail were to live symbiotically withinterpretation and opinion. The Atlas was not meant to synthesise allmaterial already available in print, but to offer a window upon a body ofknowledge, a photographer's snapshot informed by the filtering perceptionsof time and space in the late 1990s. It was to complement and supplementother general histories and to engage with both the primary archive and pastscholarly monographs which had used maps or spatially-driven relationshipsas part of research methodologies or published findings. Throwing downthe gauntlet to challenge the demarcation between ·history and geography,this Atlas uses maps and other graphic devices to tell the stoty rather thantext. The collaboration which was needed for this kind of

9. Emily Carr, Fresh Seeing (roronto & Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1972).ID. Newsletter 0/the Historical Atlas o/New Zealand, no.l, July 1991, p.IO.I!. Ibid., no.3,June 1992, p.3.

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reconceptualisation was immense: scholars worked closely withcartographers to achieve a balance of idea and form, a synthesis of subjectmatter and visual display. At each stage, the role of the reader as visualinterpreter was emphasised as the cartographers moved towards user-centreddesign, a desideratum of modern digital, multimedia design.Is such innovation merely window-dressing or is it a whole rethinking of

the basis of visual knowledge? I believe it is the latter, and while the Atlasattempts to put into practice a new approach to the visualisation ofknowledge, its success is qualified, not conceptually, but because it went toprint rather than remaining in the electronic domain. This is particularlyevident in the Atlas's commitment to interdisciplinarity and to thepresentation and representation of historical information from a Maoriperspective. Both are preeminently suited to the multimedia environment.The Atlas is divided into five broad temporal sweeps arrangedchronologically: Island Building; The World of the Maori; Post-contact; TheDominion; Post-Sixties. Within these divisions, the subject headings areenormous (though not exhaustive or comprehensive) and the range ofexpertise consulted vast: history, geography, religion, archaeology,horticulture, communication, industry, transport, Maori issues. Such acommitment to interdisciplinarity is symptomatic of other recentinternational atlas initiatives from The Atlas of Literature to the ElectronicCultural Atlas - and the proposed Electronic Atlas of the Book. We'll returnto this last example below.The Historical Atlas was always conceived as a document both of Maori

and Pakeha history. McKinnon's metaphor of. reading as a journey isapposite here, as is his emphasis upon the story-telling impulse, thesynecdoctal narrative, which underpins modern perceptions ofhistoriography. By claiming that the A tlas offers a conversational, dialogicframework, he removes it from the monolithic, pre-emptive, one-stopshopping syndrome of the standard reference work. In foregrounding thestory, he also recuperates the importance of orality for a country whosehistory to this day is one of complex, dynamic interaction between vibrantoral and print cultures. The challenge for both creator and reader of thisatlas is how to 'map' oral culture in a print medium, particularly when thelatter has been perceived, for better or worse, as an instrument ofcolonisation and colonial oppression. Derek Lardelli's four speaking imagesembrace the Maori view of world-making,12 and while visually non-cartographic in the conventional sense, they are rich 'textual' manifestations

12. Plates 2 and 3: Te Orokohanganga mai 0 te Ao - Before Ranginui andPapatuanuku: the origins of the world; Te Ao Marama - The world of light: theworld we inhabit; Te Ika-a-Maui, Te Waka-o-Maui - The fish of Maui and the canoeof Maui; Nga Whakario 0 te Whenua - Sculpting the landscape.

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of artistically-rendered voices organised as whare whakairo or embracing thetheme of the marae or meeting house ridge-pole.In the ten Papatuanuku plates, innovative digital terrain maps, the twO-

dimensional equivalent of three-dimensional plastic relief modelling, recountMaori historical geography by visualising the various journeys andmigrations which resonate through the names and stories marking thelandscape of Aotearoa. One reviewer likened these plates, rather unfairly, to'spinach lasagna with a cheese topping scrumptiously grilled ... Sprinkledabout in the topping, like chopped up oregano, is lots of semi-legible text.'lJHad the visual feast 'inspired more perhaps by French haute cuisine ratherthan the simple pleasures of peasant food'14 been served up as hypertext,then the density of Maori historical geography could have been preserved,and the layering of Pakeha settlement over time also evoked. Two languagesand two cultures occupy the same space; the electronic medium could showboth separately and in dynamic relation through time. Yet, in its printfonn, the Atlas is unable to move beyond the segregation of the Lardelli andPapatuanuku plates from the rest of the atlas; their visual representation oftopographical storytelling goes underground with the moreconventionalised 'western' graphical organisation of the majority of theatlas. The cartographic 'legend' formerly pushed to the margins of thegraphic realisation becomes the living 'legend' of the Maori plates. Thus,although the storytelling impulse is restructured by print practice, itsmultimedia potential points to a significant rethinking of the readingmachine and the interaction between 'text' and animatory reader/oralperformer.From the beginning of the project, Barry BradIey, the Atlas's ChiefCartographer, extolled the virtues of designing in a digital mode. Contraryto the laborious and expensive manual hand-rendering andphotolithographic processes of traditional mapmaking, the production teamcombined a proprietary drawing programme with a pre-press publishingprogramme. This enabled flexibility as well as quality control and facilitatedthe innovative graphic solutions which required varying degrees oftransparency for digital overlays. The Atlas was meant to be 'heavy inillustrative solutions rather than topographic fidelity. The digitalenvironment allows free experimentation in the conceptualisation of datadisplay _ virtually at the touch of the keyboard.'15 However, it was neithercomputer manipulation, nor the degree of experimental collaboration

13. Wilkes, p.313.14. Olssen, p.6.15. Newsletter of the New Zealand Historical Atlas, no.2, November 1991, p.3. See

also Barry Bradley, 'Cartography for the New Zealand Atlas', New Zealand MapSociety Journal 7, 1993, pp.SS-S9.

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between cartographers and contributors which created problems, but thenature of digital representation itself. WYSIWIG, or 'What you see· is whatyou get', was continually undercut as digital screen imaging differed, oftensignificantly, from print output. By not being able to believe the screenrepresentation, 'the lie of the land' I Ko Papatuanuku e Takoto Nei, wasindeed the 'lie' of the land. Had this project remained completely within thedigital environment, this particular problem would not have occurred. 16 Anelectronic version of the A tlas is still a desired outcome; it works betterconceptually and practically as a hypertext document than a print product.Paradoxically, the chances of this occurring are becoming slimmer as newsoftwares replace old without total compatiblity functions, and themachines used to read the older versions become outdated in turn. Enteringpost-production corrections has almost reached the limit of technologicaland economic capability. So, in the current print version, we have all theelements of an electronic, hypertextual atlas without the hotlinks, and thusalso without the information retrieval systems possible to enhance the visualexperience, and without the animations to produce a theatre of virtualhistorical geography. The Atlas may be as close to the interactive as ispossible in the print medium, but it cannot move beyond the physicaldimensionality of its container.How, if at all then, will the New Zealand Historical Atlas affect

scholarship? It may be too early to tell, but two responses have alreadyshown their hand. Significantly, both by-pass the questions about graphicrepresentation posed by the Atlas, and both assume that a picture cannotpaint a thousand words. The first is symptomatic of the academic researcherwho prefers to stay within the margins of conventional text-drivenscholarship by producing journal articles to supplement if not replace whathas been visually encoded in the Atlas. Given the academy's generalresistance to the legitimacy of electronic publishing, this is hardlysurprising. Adrienne Simpson's 'Putting entertainment on the map: theNew Zealand touring circuits in 1874'17 explains her journey of research ascontributor to the A tlas. While she does not consciously attempt to upstagethe Atlas's role as a visual interpreter, the underlying assumption is thatwhat is left out in the snapshot approach can only be told in a piece ofconventional historiography, replete with footnotes, appendices, and all.The second response, while incisive in isolating the issue, is more disturbing.Fairburn's postulation that the visual can never achieve the complexity of

. 16. Browser compatibility and alterations to the visual representation ofmformation (particularly with colour) enter into the equation in the digitalenvironment, although recent advances in graphic interfaces and reader programmesare working to retain total design integrity.

17. Australasian Drama Studies 26, April 1995, pp.153-176.

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54 Bibliographical Society ofA ustralia and New Zealand

conceptual communication possible in print is a complete refusal to engageboth with what the Atlas has endeavoured to create and the long history andsuccess of lexivisuality in atlas production.In a recent article in The New York Review ofBooks, Robert Darnton, a

leading scholar who has helped define the contemporary study of bookhistory, calls for a new form of writing and reading. His vision of theelectronic monograph is as a pyramid of knowledge, structured in layerseach composed of different kinds of information, serving different purposesand audiences, all accessible through hypertext links which enable furtherinteractive exploration of the primary archive as well engagement with thesubject's community of readers and commentators. Darnton still posits aGutenbergian object as the apex of his pyramid: a paperback with a concise(also read simple and intelligible) account of the subject. However, he alsorecognises the possibility of fruitful on-line interaction and transparency atall levels which enables each user ultimately to generate his/her own text.'Far from being utopian, the electronic monograph could meet the needs ofthe scholarly community at the points where its problems converge. Itcould provide a tool for prying problems apart and opening up a new spacefor the extension of learning.'!8One such electronic monograph in potentia is the Electronic A tlas of the

Book, a Canadian initiative which grew, revealingly, out of response toanother landmark work of historical geography. Fiona Black of ReginaPublic Library in Saskatchewan and Bertrum MacDonald of DalhousieUniversity in NovaScotia both recognised the potential of geographicinformation systems (GIS) for the study of book history when looking atthe Historical A tlas of Canada. One plate, 'The Printed Word,' used GIS toanalyse a small sample of print culture data, and then used its digitalmapping capabilities to create a graphic representation of public librariesand newspapers in Canada in 189l.19 Extrapolating from this model, Blackand MacDonald realised that by using GIS, information from multipledatasets as varied as census, immigration, shipping, book trade, and literacy(to name but a few) can be collected, manipulated, and analysed with easeover the twin coordinates of time and space. Moreover, micro- and macro-data compiled in conjunction with the burgeoning national history of thebook projects can be brought together to generate a more accurate pictureof the creation, production, dissemination, reading, and preservation ofprint artifacts. As a result of using this new research tool, for the first timescholars can now entertain the possibility of a truly international book

18. Robert Darnton, 'The New Age of the Book', New York Review ofBooks, 16March 1999, <http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/>.viewed 18 March 1999.

19. R. Louis Gentilcore, ed., Historical Atlas of Canada, Volume II, The LandTransformed, 1800·1891 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), plate 51.

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history.20 The projected atlas will function totally within the electronicdomain and will engage with the robust and flexible, fully interactive,multimedia and hypertextual capabilities of the medium. Significantly, theElectronic A tlas of the Book presents a visualisation of knowledge which willlook beyond localised case studies to track the larger rhythms of historicaland cultural development.21In New Zealand, our own Historical Atlas has provided a timely

conceptual bridge to contemplate this new Electronic Atlas of the Book. TheHistorical Atlas's visual orientation when imagined as a fully digitalhypertext product can lead us, I believe, to a new way of researching andwriting book history. How will this new 'bibliography' or writing aboutbooks look? It will be lexivisual, multidimensional, and syncretic. GISaffords a singular opportunity to create interactive and animated visualswhich can graphically represent or cinematise, in effect, ideas or mind-maps;GIS also enables the storage and on-line retrieval of databanks which permitresearchers to manipulate data themselves, ask print culture questions notpossible in other media, and to generate visual projections. How will we, inNew Zealand, begin? Working with Black and MacDonald, researchers atVictoria University of Wellington will commence with a survey andassessment of extant electronic databases and their suitability for the GISenvironment, followed by the commissioning of specific research to fill thegaps or retrospectively convert paper-based datasets. Trans-Tasmannegotiations are underway to create an electronic, on-line Australasian BookTrade Index to link with the equivalent British, Sconish and trans-Atlanticprojects. This index will accelerate the formulation of database standardsand quality control mechanisms for multi-national input, and provide aresearch tool for the new generation of book historians. On-line pilotstudies will be integrated into post-graduate and post-doctoral research,followed by the integrated development of design specifications incollaboration with the Canadian book atlas team.For New Zealand print culture studies, the rewards of participating in

this venture are enormous. Rather than blindly working towards theconceptually impossible dream of an independent 'national' book history,we can take full advantage of our geographic position at the crossroads (not

20. Fiona A. Black, Bertrum H. MacDonald & J. Malcolm W. Black,'Geographic Information Systems: A New Research Method for Book History',Book History 1,1998, pp.1l-31.

21. Anthony Grafton, 'Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise?:Guillaume Bude and His Books', Papers 0/ the Bibliographical Society 0/ America91(2), June 1997, p.143, quoted by Bertrum MacDonald & Fiona Black in 'UsingGIS for Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Print Culture',unpublished conference paper (November 1998).

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margins) of book production, dissemination and preservation. We can, forexample, effectively map our historic reliance upon international networksof trade and exchange, plot the migration of personnel, technology andequipment, trace the influence of multinational consortia upon our modernprinting and publishing industries, chart complex reading patterns overtime, and define if not redefine the 'topsy-turvy' history of the book wehave come to accept as our own. Eighteen months ago, we could hardlyimagine such possibilities; thanks to the publication of the Historical Atlas ofNew Zealand and the initiative of a few Canadians, we can now lookforward to a new and exciting millennium mapping the geography of thebook - digitally.

Victoria UniversityWellington