Visualizing the invisible and Bridging the gap

Arch of Titus, Forum Romanum, Rome

(In the declaration for this blog I promised occasional glimpses of the daily ordeals of life in Academia. Here it goes - scroll down if you find it boring. It's okay, I sometimes feel the same listening to myself.) 

During the past week I have been experiencing a slightly worrying level of scatter mindedness, presently of the magnitude where I have to double check that all clothes are on and that it is the work bag, not the garbage, I am carrying before taking off for work. The reason for this - or so I hope, at least - is our imminent move to Rome for a period, and the thousands of big and small details to get sorted before we go: school for the children, care for our half-blind cat, copies of manuscript sources, packing for four persons (weather: Hot? Cold? Rainy?), deciding what small number of toys and children's books to bring, arrange all cloud based computer storages, databases etc so they work together, writing good old paper letters to research funds to requisition money, sending sad aging smart phone on the last journey, replace with new and happier phone, and so on. Like that, night and day, while simultaneously going back and forth to my university in Umeå and preparing the last lectures in Museology on 17th century antiquity politics before I leave. I will make sure to count the children an extra time before boarding the plane, and the rest will just have to work somehow. (End of Ordeals, back to Research.)

The reason for me to start this blog was, as I wrote previously, the PhD course on Digital History where academic blogging is one of the tasks. Another task is to figure out, design and technically develop a digital project related to my thesis, and at best something that actually helps me in my work and can be useful even after the course is finished. Being childishly delighted over technical gadgets and the countless possibilities of the digital development - in particular when applied to the premodern period and sources I work on - I find this task exciting and challenging, and actually also a bit tricky to solve. Why? The focus of my research topic, the heritagisation of sacredness and religion, are processes that are characterized by the fact that they are invisible to the eye; the statue of a saint which was perceived as sacred and an object of worship and devotion yesterday is being transformed into a museum object today, physically exactly the same but with new and completely different sets of narratives connected to it. So, my challenge seems to be: How do I visualize the invisible in an interesting and academically relevant way?

When starting to explore the possibilites offered to historians in the digital world, one finds quite an impressive number of useful, beautifully designed and generally really cool projects (and, needless to say, some less brilliant work as well). Just to give you an idea of the possibilities brought by various visualization projects, take a look at the Mapping Statues project, where you get a visual idea of statues and their placement in Rome on a chronological line. Or the amazing Orbis: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, where you can calculate the length of time, resources needed and much more for journeys through the historical Roman Empire. Besides the fact that stuff like this give me goosebumps of excitement, I am convinced they add important dimensions to our understanding of theoretical and immaterial processes, events and cultures. Again, it is the use of all our senses and the way they help us learn and understand things, abilities that have been looked down upon and excluded from academic history research for long periods. I believe much potential knowledge and understanding has been missed in this.

As for my dissertation case study with the Swedish Lutheran peregrination travelers to Rome in the 17th century, one of my crucial questions is: How did these young men, coming from a culturally not very developed country (at least not in comparison to Italy at the time) where a heated debate about the dangers of Catholic influences was going on, experience the Catholic objects, habits, rituals, culture etc. when coming to Rome for a brief visit as (what we now call) tourists? My aim is to say something about how they might have reacted to and classified these objects and events - as exotic, sacred, threatening, aestetic, historical, etc. - based on their travel journals or diaries, but also by trying to find out what they saw and how they saw it. 

No matter how well I do my source studies and my background research, I must be aware of the risk of speculating and getting lost in assumptions; there is an inevitable gap between what I know to be true, what I can read and see and touch, and what I assume and guess to be true. I imagine creating visualizations of a lost past offers not only the fantastic thrills and possibilities to find and share new knowledge and understanding, but also a rather severe temptation to jump to conclusions, draw the lines just a little longer and thicker, to fill in the gap instead of minding it. Is this a risk, or am I being over-cautious?

What I am considering as my digital project at the moment, when having given up on the possibilities of visualizing the invisible (well, perhaps not forever, but for now), is a map based digital visualization of a selected few of my diary writers and their movements and primary sightseeings in Rome. The tools I have started to try out for this are Omeka and Neatline, and among the sources I plan to use are diaries, archive records etc related to these travellers. Her is an example from Uppsala University library of what it can look like:

Travel journal of Olof Celsius sr (1670-1756) showing a plan over the Vatican Library

Another type of sources are the guidebooks published all through the 17th century to meet the demands of a growing number of visitors to the Eternal City - pious pilgrims as well as, perhaps, less pious or at least not Catholic travelers interested in culture, art and history. An example of these guidebooks is Le cose marauigliose dell'alma città di Roma, doue si tratta delle chiese, stationi, & reliquie de' corpi santi, che ui sono. by Girolamo Francini and Andrea Palladio. It was printed in Venice in 1625, issued for the twelfth jubilee of the Catholic church, and based on an original edition from 1575.

When I started to think of possible ways to perform this task, I imagined how it would be to actually walk with my travelers through Rome as it looked at the time: no cars, no concrete buildings, no Mussolini streets. Searching the web for inspiration I found that Emory University, US, had done exactly this and launched the project just a couple of weeks earlier. They have made a visualization that can be explored with gaming controls, based on Giovanni Battista Falda's famous map Roma in Prospettiva from 1676, and where even the shifting light of the day can be adjusted. Check out a presentation of the project here. I am hoping to get a possibility to try this model at some point, and to be able to almost literally walk in the footsteps of the travelers I am trailing; to see at least some of what they saw, based on their own accounts, and then add some of that - after all, inevitable - ingredient of magic that is Imagination.

Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome. Added to and altered since the 3rd century, but still there.

Byproducts of death: Thoughts on the fate of bones

Head of Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) 

In my department, Culture and Media Studies, a group of likeminded colleagues has started to discuss and write on various topics connected to the research field called Death Studies. It all started somewhere early this year with an e-mail popping down in my mailbox, where a Professor just wanted to check if anyone was interested in meeting and talk about death. This is one of the many great things with this job: I suspect such an approach doesn't appear in every office, but it did in mine.

Already up to my knees in the death field (since museums and heritage are tightly related to death, and also to rebirth), and after having received a blessing from one of my supervisors, I happily joined what is now commonly referred to as "the Death Group" (one simply has to like that, right?). It soon was obvious that the concept of "death" triggered a vast range of topics and aspects in our interdisciplinary circle; from the semi-death in cryonics, via zombies and dumpster diving, to Medieval Pietà - and much more in between. In June a special issue of Kulturella Perspektiv ("Cultural Perspectives") was published in Swedish, where my contribution bore the title (translated) "Death in the Souvenir shop: Mortal Remains as Cult and Curiosities" and touched upon the many layers of charging and re-charging in Christian relics.

In brief, I wanted to describe how the many similarities between the concepts 'heritage' and 'sacredness', similarities that are one of my starting points for my PhD project, partially derive from the collecting and veneration of relics. These relic collections eventually developed into art cabinets or proto-museums, and then into Western European museums as we are used to see them.
Relics could and still can be found in the shape of actual human remains, or as second and third degree relics, meaning something that has touched the remains or something that has touched something that was once touched by the saint - a contagious sacredness that is physically transmitted. Relics also strongly emphasizes the material aspect and the sensual relationship to sacred objects, an aspect that has been highlighted by Caroline Walker Bynum in Christian Materiality (2011) and Charles Freeman in Holy Dust, Holy Bones (2011).

Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373): Here, there, and everywhere

From a museological point of view, what I find particularly fascinating is the constant re-charging and creation of new and very different narratives connected to relics. Saint Bridget of Sweden, for example, was not only a well documented spiritual person in 14th century Europe, she was also of royal ancestry and did not hesitate to intervene in high politics. When she died in Rome her body was 'ossificated', which meant the soft parts of the body were removed, and her bones (except for some of them that remained in her house in Rome) were carried in a shrine to Vadstena, Sweden, where she had founded her first convent. Like many bone relics from the Middle Ages and even from the times of the first Christians, Saint Bridget's bones can now be found in a number of countries, settings, contexts and narratives; a small flake of her bones was given to Uppsala Cathedral by Bridgettin sisters in the 1980's, an act that caused an animated debate since the cathedral is Lutheran and the veneration of saints and relics is not commonly accepted there. However, a special silver shrine was made and the relic was given an honorable place in a choir.

Just a few miles away, in 17th century Skokloster Castle with a collection of around 50,000 objects preserved through families and centuries, another flake of Saint Bridget is kept. Here, though, no silver shrine has been made and no veneration takes place, because this part of the Saint's bones is cathegorized as a museum object. It is properly listed in the museum inventory, and dated "19th century" probably due to the papal certificate from that time stating the authenticity of the bone fragment. What is Bridget doing there, in a Baroque collection containing numerous other things but not of a specifically pious character? The answer lies in one of the previous owners, the noble Brahe family, who (wrongly, as it later turned out) proudly announced themselves to be related to this famous saint and thus also of royal blood. This assumed relationship resulted in the collecting of Bridget memorabilia of various sorts and qualities, where the relic is just one of many items.

In my short article I ended up in the souvenir shop, where third degree relics are sold amongst the postcards and amulets with no specific demands on belief or intention with the buyer. I asked how we should understand this multi-layered existence that is a relic: as layer upon layer of death, or as a rebirth upon rebirth as new and different existences? This topic is fascinating, even without having touched upon the excitements of other aspects such as secular relics (pieces of hair etc from famous persons, Jimi Hendrix' guitar - or what's left of it - and so on), and I was glad to hear this morning when meeting my fellow Death Group members that our exploration of death and its connotations will go on and probably result in a publication, and perhaps also in a workshop or conference.

This, dear readers, is one of the many geeky sides of Academia: How contemplating Death can make you feel so vibrantly alive.

Memory Boxing

Thinking in images, or with the aid of images, might sometimes be a useful help to approach and analyze theoretical matters. For me it comes naturally since I have been associating people, feelings, processes, music, etc, with images for as long as I can remember.
One such image, or model, was presented and discussed in a session during the ISCH conference in Istanbul, namely: The Memory Box.

I have had a least two serious memory boxes in my life; the first, a Hofnar cigar box in wood where I collected a treasure of immeasurable value (others would have called it old, broken jewelry that my mom gave me); the second, a tin box with an 18th century woman in a white and blue dress printed on the lid. In this latter box I collected things that were charged with special, and not necessarily material, value to me, through memories of persons, events and emotions. I keep it still on the shelf in my study.

The project presented is a collaboration between universities in Mainz and Turku (Åbo) initiated in 2011, and they use the Memory Box as a method for analyzing the transfer of media (art works etc) between cultures. Aleida Assmans book Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (2011) was referred to as a starting point for the project's use of the concept, and she was said to stress the origin of the word 'box' in Latin's 'arca', arc. A memory box, also when used in this metaphoric way, was described as a fragile container, equal to the human mind. We were given examples of memory boxes in the shape of artefacts, 'topoi' (a collection of stereotypes, used for example as a rhetorical tool) or persons, and an emphasis was put on the content in the box and the (eventual) opening of the box. The papers were very interesting and the project fascinating, and it generated a vivid discussion with objections as well as acclamations, and many questions.

For me, I found myself being most interested in what was left outside of the box (still in this metaphorical sense). Some things, actually most things, are always left outside of the memory production, either on purpose or because they are forgotten, and I believe much of interest can be discovered by turning the museum/memory spotlight in the other direction for a while. This process is referred to by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as 'the agency of display'; by pointing out things, by highlighting them and appoint them to be representatives of a certain narrative, we also point away from other things. I find this shadowland of forgotten or deliberately dismissed things tremendously fascinating!

And, for the same reasons I guess, I find the wrapping and the wrapper of this imagined memory box even more intriguing than the opening and the opener. Opening a memory box is a question of reception, emotion and associations, while wrapping it - deciding what should be in it, what not, and for what reasons - is in my understanding an act of power and control. This Power Of The Wrapper is executed by museum practitioners, researchers, authors, artists, policy makers and everyone creating narratives of the past - with or without an outspoken agenda. Continuing my reflexions on the memory box as a relevant tool for analyzing the production of memory and heritage, I come to think of a George Orwell quote: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

One crucial question demands an answer from me: As a researcher exploring heritage, heritagisation and museums, who am I: the Wrapper, the Opener, or even a kind of Memory Box?   

Authenticity and the irresistible desire to touch

I couldn't resist. I just had to touch the column beside the place where the 9th century Viking Halfdan once carved his name while visiting the by then already 300 year old church of Hagia Sophia. It was mind-boggling.

Finally home again after a long journey from the ISCH (International Society for Cultural History) conference in Istanbul. Going to a conference has many potential values, such as trying your research ideas/results/questions on a competent and hopefully benevolent group of colleagues, getting feedback, learning from others, giving feedback, and - of course - the ever important networking. This time, I left the busy and yet-to-be-explored city filled to the brim with impressions, discussions, new knowledge, new ideas - and some really nice new acquaintances. I get more and more convinced that one of the main raison d'êtres for academia is sharing: by listening, by commenting, by teaching, by the constructive disagreements. I believe the digital development makes sharing so very much easier (and more fun!) - given that people want to share, of course.

Back to the conference, and to the ever present theme of authenticity. In a city like Istanbul where the cultural layers are many and diverse, the question of what is real and what is fake, or what is original and what is a later addition, is an inevitable framework. And for me, being born and raised in a Western European context, the materiality aspect of reality is initially hard to avoid when understanding and interpreting heritage and history. One side of this, the connection between authenticity and materiality (as bearing witness of an authentic past?), is the irresistible desire to touch. I believe there are numerous parallels to the physical relation to sacred objects here.

I have seen them at countless heritage places and in numerous settings: the visitors who, sometimes with a partly ashamed, partly guilty appearance can't hold themself back, but have to touch the walls, the objects, the ground which presumably bear witness of certain events in history or just of a very distant time. They do this despite knowing that touching is generally not permitted in heritage environments due to preservation, and despite, perhaps, a rational doubt why they do this. During my visit to Hagia Sophia and the Cistern in Istanbul, I saw in both places a certain column associated with stories about wishings coming true and other magical events for those who touched it in a certain way. In both cases there were people lining up to perform this ritual of magic touch, and in both cases the people doing this were laughing and making funny faces to a companion with a camera; this was obviously something inviting, thrilling, sensual, but also something a bit shameful that needed ridicule to pass.

 
Visitor touching the ornamented pillar in Justinian's 6th century cisterns in Istanbul


Not only touching, but performing a full circle with the thumb in the hole in the Sweating Pillar or Wishing Column in musealised church-turned-mosque Hagia Sophia is a popular ritual for fulfilling wishes, or just for fun - or because it's a must-do according to guide books?

As for myself, despite considering myself both respectful towards heritage authorities and - in some sense, at least - a sensible person, I am an incurable toucher. There is something to it - but what, exactly? For now, my best answer leans towards the problematic concept of 'Authenticity'. Input, please..?

Becoming a digital historian

Embarking on yet another new journey - for, yes, there have been a few during my one year as a PhD student and the decision some time before that to re-enter Academia after many years in what is commonly known as Reality. In order to learn more about Digital Humanities, I have been given the assignment to start a research blog. The idea is not strange to me; on the contrary I have been pondering reasons for and against blogging since I started working on my PhD. However, being advised against blogging by some of my colleagues (and for seemingly good reasons: it takes time from my main work, I risk getting my results stolen if I publish them in a blog, etc), and with both good and bad previous experiences of professional blogging, I wanted to be very careful about 'how' and 'why' before committing to regular on-line publishing.

But... Here I am, having started a most thrilling PhD course in Digital History, and being sent out in the world (the physical as well as the digital) with the words: "Go forth and start a blog!". So here we go: "Fiat blog - et blog erat"! After last week's inspiring first days of the Digital History course, and after giving a lecture in Museology about the history of nationalism (a topic that seems to stick to everything connected with heritage, and sometimes also with religion), I now prepare my paper for the ISCH conference in Istanbul starting Wednesday this week. I look very much forward to going, since Istanbul itself is in a way an illustration of my research topic with layers upon layers of re-charged religious identities ending up as heritage and narratives. I will give a report on this when I get back - until then, you are welcome to join me on twitter @helena_w_strom for immediate impressions from the conference.

Apart from this, I am also preparing for a research period of six months in Rome, where I will enjoy the company of my 17th century travelers and follow in their footsteps (and, according to plan, doing some digital visualization of some kind of their meeting with the Eternal City. I'll get back to that). Very much to get in order before leaving, and therefore an even wilder dance of joy at the letterbox when a good old CD arrived today packed with photos of a 17th century diary in manuscript. Each job has its moments of bliss, I suppose, but I feel particularly grateful to be dancing for joy over a digitized manuscript on office hours!