In our assigned readings, our discussions in class, and my work with the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito, I was most interested in relationships of space and place and the ways in which place names might reflect these relationships.

In my previous blog post, I described my search for “London” using the World Historical Gazetteer, which resulted in what might be described as the physical space of London, England, as well as other physical spaces referred to in whole or in part by “London,” such as Little London, a community in Jamaica. I considered how shared place names might reflect various relationships among places, such as imperial or colonial relationships, or instances in which those inhabiting a place might seek to form or emphasize a connection with another place through a shared place name.

Such intentional place naming might have an effect of collapsing spatial and temporal distance, as is the case in the documents I chose for my work with Recogito. A group of four short texts from 1927–1928 from my current research on Washington National Cathedral reveals intentional references to places, eras, and individuals in medieval Europe and in the “Old World” more generally. These references were made by an individual in America in the twentieth century in order to emphasize, if not form, a connection between these medieval places and people and the Episcopal cathedral in the nation’s capital.

The spatial and temporal distance of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from medieval Europe is a tension that underlies this example and American medievalism more broadly. In what ways is it possible to create “medieval” architecture in a place that is spatially, temporally, and culturally distant from Europe in the Middle Ages? In the documents I chose for my work with Recogito, various materials brought to Washington National Cathedral, the provenance attributions of these materials, and the architectural style of the cathedral were intended to form and emphasize a connection between the place of the cathedral and the place of the “Old World.” In addition to the linguistic naming of a place, it seems to me that we can consider the ways in which an architectural style, as a kind of visual language, can construct and evoke a sense of place. It would be interesting to see what spatial results would be returned for “medieval” and “Gothic” if searched for using Frankenplace, a project of the Platial Analysis Lab that visualizes the geographic associations of Wikipedia entries, which Karl Grossner shared with us during class and which does not seem to be live at the moment, as Grossner noted.

Working with the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito was useful in that these tools encouraged me to continue thinking about the relationships of space and place and how these relationships may be reflected in visualization tools. Aside from visualizing these relationships, however, I’m not sure whether the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito are tools that I would return to for my particular research. While I do think that a visualization tool would be useful, ideally such a tool would allow me to visualize and interact with the spatial and temporal aspects of an object’s provenance, documenting the object’s positions and movements in space and time—perhaps something like Itinera?