GEOMAT: A METHOD OF WEB ARCHITECTURE TO ARTICULATE EVENTS IN TIME AND SPACE

1. GEOMAT:A METHOD OF WEB ARCHITECTURE TO ARTICULATE EVENTS IN TIME AND SPACE Ann Evans Larimore Professor Emerita, Residential College Sandra Lach Arlinghaus Adjunct Professor, School of Natural Resources and Environment Robert Haug Ph.D. Pre-Candidate, Department of Near Eastern Studies All of The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor GEOMAT: Geographic Events Ordering: Maps, Archives, Timelines.

2. Introduction • For analyzing and presenting the historical geography of series of events that change the geography of places and regions, we introduce GEOMAT, a web architectural methodology. • The GEOMAT methodology is the result of our concern to contribute historical geographical scholarship to conflict resolution efforts on many political and economic scales, particularly in cases where a conflict is at an impasse because of stubbornly held widely differing portrayals of the events in the conflict. • Often in conflict situations, the stakeholders do not know many facts and they may not know what they do not know while acting as if they knew everything necessary to know.

3. Analytical Tool • This web architecture is an analytical tool for serious scholarly research. • It locates significant events on earth-based maps and calendrical timelines linked together. Intersecting earth-based maps and calendrical timelines form the core of the method. • The use of calendrical timelines permits the identification of gaps, discrepancies, ambiguities, and uncertainties in the available data. • Archival documents and subsidiary maps and timelines are linked to the core map-timeline array of data.

4. Flexibility • GEOMAT is a flexible web shell for a case study into which the research enters four types of data: • map images • timelines of events • original documents • narratives composed by the researcher. • The analytical process made possible by this electronic format is structured according to cultural ecological epistemology.

5. Epistemology • Events are existential happenings in ecological space-time experienced by actors producing documents. • Actors include not only human agents and features of the built landscapes like cities but also • climatic events such as hurricanes • longer term conditions such as climates themselves and • landscape features including forests, deserts, rivers, and flora and fauna in their distributions and movements. • Documents such as letters, treaties, maps, all types of manuscripts and published writings, official and unofficial.

6. Format • The array of data in a web format permits the reader almost instant access to closely juxtaposed time and space data. • The reader is able to move rapidly and with great ease among large amounts of linked data that in print form would be available only in a cumbersome format. • Interactive maps integrated into the web architecture can portray a dynamic sequence of events over a particular time period.

7. Pilot Studies • Here we show some of the results from pilot studies done in a University of Michigan Winter Term 2005 course that begin to implement this web architecture design. • The next set of slides shows selected static images from these pilot studies. A link at the end shows the actual web architecture developed during that time.

8. Ottoman Emperor Suleiman • One preliminary GEOMAT (author Arlinghaus), displays the complexity of Suleiman’s patterns of military conquests. • The maps that follow are static printouts of dynamic maps captured from the associated web architecture.

9. Siege of Vienna, 1529

10. Fall of Rhodes, 1522

11. Suleiman’s Various Campaigns

12. Methodology Advantages • For the researcher, making these maps with the associated timelines systematizes the information and makes explicit the amounts of time needed for particular activities and events. • For the reader, perusing and reading these maps that present a systematic portrayal of a particular conflict, makes possible apprehending the existential time-space in which the events take place.

13. Nobel Peace Prizes • A sequence of four maps (author Larimore), showing the global distribution of Nobel Peace Prize awardees by country, appears in the following slide.  • Making these maps began by constructing a calendrical timeline of all Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to ascertain breaks in the series that would form boundaries for periodization of the awarding of the prizes. • When each period was mapped, it was found that in the last period, 1972- to the present, there was a globalization of the prizes to countries all over the planet. • The prizes represent the steady process of recognizing successes at and persistent attempts at settling grave conflict situations.

14. Peace Prizes, 1901-1918

15. Peace Prizes, 1919-1938

16. Peace Prizes, 1944-1972

17. Peace Prizes, 1973-2003

18. Abassid Portrayal • This GEOMAT method (author Haug) can be used for mapping many sorts of data in calendrical time. • The next page shows a portrayal of the establishment and operation of royal mints in the Abbasid period at a time when Abbasid power was being challenged on its periphery. • The associated link shows far more.

19. Tulunid Mints Making maps and timelines and drawing together the information linked to them, partially through animation, made possible unforeseen discoveries and inspired new questions.

20. End of the Ottoman Empire

21. Conflict Resolution • Treaties with the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republican Nationalists, 1920 and 1923 (click on the dates to link to the text—Larimore, author). • Here the web architecture has been used to draw together treaty texts and contemporary maps with expanding timelines to show fast-moving events. Bringing all these materials together is only possible online.

22. Link, Notes, Materials • LINK to pilot web architecture combining the three pilot studies above. • Haug’s project was initiated as part of the seminar Maps and Timelines in Play to Resolve Conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean:  Italy to Israel led by Professor Emerita Ann E. Larimore at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Winter of 2005. • Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, The University of Michigan. GEOMAT course proposed for additional two-year development. Related materials by the authors: • The Ottoman Empire: Boundary Transformations in Space and Time. Solstice: An Electronic Journal of Geography and Mathematics, Winter, 2005, http://www.imagenet.org/ • Beyond Conflicting Portrayals to Facts in Time and Space, Powerpoint Display presented at SSHA Conference, Nov. 13, 2003