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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Show Me How

To get a feel for Bodies and Structures, we suggest that new readers explore the site in the following ways. Be sure to check out the screencasts, which provide click-by-click guides to navigation and using the site's main tools. Click on any image to enlarge it and see its details.

If you are using the site on a mobile device, please read the Special Note for Mobile Users.

You can return to this Guide at any time via the Menu Bar in the upper-left hand corner.

Read through one or two modules

Watch “How to Navigate a Module.”
Select a module from the Modules page.

Explore using the Complete Grid Visualization

Use the Complete Grid Visualization to see how one or more of the pages you’ve just visited connect to other modules and pages within the site. Often, this will be via shared tag relationships. The pages are ordered alphabetically by title.

Watch “How to Use the Complete Grid Visualization.”

Or, pick another page or pages on the grid and explore the connections they reveal. Select a page and follow the red lines to see its tag or tags. You can also start by clicking on a tag page (a red block) to identify the various pages to which that tag relates. You might find some surprisingly generative juxtapositions.

Watch “How to Use the Complete Grid Visualization to Explore Tags.”

When clicking pages on the grid, use the Inspector to reveal details and metadata about each page.

You can click on as many pages as you want to explore different relationships or pathways through the site. (Remember, in Scalar, every object is a page.) Clicking “Visit” underneath the title will open the page in a new tab and preserve your selections on the grid.

Explore the Tag Map

Like the Complete Grid Visualization, the Tag Map allows you to see how spatial concepts take on different historical meanings in different historical contexts. In contrast to the Grid Visualization, the Tag Map allows you to start with a concept and work your way down to specific pages, rather than starting with a page and working your way up to its conceptual tags. The “tag (top) down” approach is particularly useful when you know the concept you are interested in, and want to read across places to see how it appears throughout Bodies and Structures modules.

Watch “How to Use the Tag Map”

Click to expand two or more tags to reveal the various pages they contain. Look at how the visualization shows connections or suggests combinations of tags to think with. (Note: You can also see the tags in list form on the Static Tag Index page.)

Explore the Geotagged Map

Many of the pages in Bodies and Structures contain geolocational metadata that can be rendered as pins on a Google map. Click on any pin to reveal the module it represents. (Visit the Geotagged Map.)

The Lenses tool allows you to produce more complex visualizations using the Google map widget. For a detailed guide, see below.

Use the Context button to situate yourself and make visualizations on the fly

Each page features a “context” button in the upper-right hand corner. Click on this button to reveal the page's relationships. You can also visualize this page and its relationships, right from the Context button, by clicking “Visualize.”

Use the Lenses tool to create your own visualizations

“Lenses” is a new tool for Bodies and Structures, which we developed in collaboration with Erik C. Loyer and Craig Dietrich at Scalar and with significant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Anyone can browse Lenses. To make your own Lenses, you must be signed in to your account at NCSU Scalar. Register by following these simple instructions.

What are Lenses? The Lenses tool plays a special role in Bodies and Structures. Lenses brings our readers—you!—into our multivocal spatial history. Use Lenses to search and visualize the content of the book in new ways. Set search parameters to develop more complex and focused approaches to the site’s materials. Generate novel visualizations and analyses by combining the site’s materials.

You can access Lenses at any time by selecting “Browse Lenses” from the Compass menu in the upper-left hand corner. If you are signed in to your NCSU Scalar account, you can select “Manage Lenses” from the Compass menu.

To see an example of how to use Lenses, follow along with the screencasts below:

“Lenses Screencast 1: Sourcebook.” How to create a list of all the pages that contain English-language or translated primary source materials.
“Lenses Screencast 2: Word Cloud.” How to create a word cloud from pages tagged by a particular Tag Map tag.
“Lenses Screencast 3: Metadata and Inspector.” How to use the Inspector tool to find metadata; how to use metadata to create a Lens.
“Lenses Screencast 4: Text to Grid.” How to create a Lens that visualizes pages that contain a particular text string.
“Lenses Screencast 5: Intersection and Combination.” How to use the Intersection/Combination options to create more complex Lenses.
“Lenses Screencast 6: Breadcrumbs.” How to use the Lenses tool to retrace your steps through Bodies and Structures 2.0

If you think that other readers would benefit from seeing the site through your Lens, please select “Make Public” from the dropdown menu in the Lens Content Selector. This will submit your Lens to David and Kate for review.

For more suggestions about how to use Bodies and Structures for research or in the classroom, continue on this path. For more on our theoretical framework and findings, proceed to “Reorienting Our Scholarship.” Or if you want to jump right into the site, proceed to the Main Menu.

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page is referenced by:

Why Think Spatially?
One of the important points that I want to make about visualizations, spatial relations, and spatial history is something that I did not fully understand until I started doing this work…: visualization and spatial history are not about producing illustrations or maps to communicate things that you have discovered. It is a means of doing research; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past.”
—Richard White, “What is Spatial History?” (2010)
Bodies and Structures enables open-ended conversations about the significance of space to history. It is a place where the grassroots of research can shape the pathways of interpretation in new ways. Above all, it is a space of encounter whose contours grow and twist and reach out in as many ways as the loosely-defined “field” of spatial history does.
The paths that follow describe in concrete detail how you as a reader can engage with the site. The remainder of this page briefly shares the intellectual aims of our Bodies and Structures project.*
An Open-Ended Conversation
Space is the "simultaneity of stories-so-far,” Doreen Massey wrote (2005, 9). Different experiences and articulations of place produce and invoke different concepts of space. The reverse is also true. Yet digital spatial history projects frequently rely on the cartographic map as the foundation for representing space and place. Cartographic maps, and their twenty-first century ArcGIS-based cousins, naturalize the modern cartographic imaginary as the foundation of spatial history. Locating spatial histories on a cartographic map makes it difficult to differentiate the modern cartographic imaginary—an imaginary grounded in the rationalities of capitalism and European imperialism—from the multiplicity of spatialities that actually existed.
Bodies and Structures 2.0 provincializes the cartographic map so that you can explore the simultaneity of individual experiences of a particular locale and the simultaneity of completely different places existing in the same locale. Some of our stories take place within the modern cartographic imaginary. Some describe aspects of its emergence. Others take place within spatial imaginaries defined by different principles—by biological imperatives, by affects, or by the gendered space of the household. We explore the spaces constituted by the transgressive mobilities of women on the run, and those constituted by elite actors seeking to reshape the political spaces they inhabit. Overall, Bodies and Structures 2.0 enables you to glimpse the depth of possible spatial histories while maintaining a critical distance from the cartographic map as one spatial historical framework.
Shaping the Pathways of Interpretation
Bodies and Structures 2.0 invites you to begin an open-ended conversation about how we, as scholars and students, interpret the relationships between our historical actors and the spatial structures they inhabited, encountered, and created. Each module provides its own analyses and interpretations of the people, events, locales, documents, and concepts that it discusses. As an editorial collective, we also provide a Tag Map that indexes the site’s contents by spatial concepts. But we know that other organizational strategies are possible—and that others will become visible when readers combine, visualize, or otherwise spatialize the site's materials in new ways. Above all, it is this practice of open-ended interpretation that is the goal of the site.
The site’s approach to navigation and orientation facilitates open-ended interpretation. Bodies and Structures 2.0 treats mapping as way finding. In the words of Edward Casey, the site allows mapping to “resume its original sense of charting one’s way in a given place or region” (2007, 512). Yet, rather than charting your way through “modern East Asia,” it would be more accurate to say that you will be finding your way through Bodies and Structures.
The site provides five tools to enable your wayfinding: the list of modules, the Tag Map, the Geotagged Map, the Complete Grid, and Lenses. In addition, the module pages contain Notes that indicate connections to other modules. You can also click on the Context button at any time to see where you are in the relational space of Bodies and Structures. Each of these methods will be discussed in detail in the following pages of our Guided Tour.
Spaces of Encounter
Bodies and Structures 2.0 encourages you to examine the spatial histories of “modern East Asia” in a geographically and conceptually open-ended manner. Geographically, it is a history that spans the globe. Conceptually, it is a history that encompasses myriad modes of place-making and establishing senses of self. Rather than understand “modern East Asia” as a bounded place, we approach it as a space produced through encounters between Boundaries, Environments, Rationalities, Figures, Flows and Immobilities, Imaginative Geographies, and Vehicles. These crossings, and their mutual interactions, shape the material experience and discursive representation of belonging, the formation of social bodies and ideas of the social, the constitution of subjectivities, and thus the play of power in particular historical moments. They also serve as nodal points for drawing connections across modules—they are topoi within our digital environment—and ways of tracking forms of thought and action across a range of contexts in modern East Asia.
These crossings and the encounters they generate define our work as scholars as much as they define the lives of our historical actors. Our use of “modern East Asia” to categorize the scope and the object of the project’s interventions reflects our own place as scholars. Having been trained as area specialists within the disciplines of History, Art History, and Literature, our professional and personal place-making is tied to the material and intellectual/imaginal space/places of East and Southeast Asia and to the political-economic conditions informing those locations—the archives, conferences, and classrooms through which we move and in which our bodies are emplaced; the positions for which we have been hired; the places we construct through our research and writing; the conversations in which we engage; and the specific languages we employ are all part of the place-making apparatus that is scholarship.
The challenge for us as scholars and as readers is to articulate these places and senses of self in a way that recognizes their fundamental truth—not as examples that reify our current geohistorical categories, but as windows into the everyday collisions of perceived, conceived, and lived space that constitute the history of human beings in the modern world. In that vein, Bodies and Structures 2.0 is a “flat” space. All articulations of space and place are granted equal authority. We use the Tag Map, Complete Grid Visualization, Geotagged Map, List of Modules, and Lenses to suggest new ways of categorizing these articulations. But we encourage readers to create their own interpretive strategies as well. Our historical actors—from statesmen and intellectuals down to itinerant peddlers and village tinsmiths—emplaced themselves and were emplaced, with varying degrees of self-reflexivity, within geotemporal constructs that continue to require investigation for their real and lasting impact on relations among humans and between humans and their environments.
* Read the full overview essay, “What We're Doing.”
References
Casey, Edward S. “Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History.” Rethinking History 11, no. 4 (2007): 507–12.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.
White, Richard. “What Is Spatial History?” Accessed January 16, 2018. https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.