After endless modifications, I am finished with my project. I hope you enjoy it! Manakin Revised
Well, much like my quick post from earlier this week, the project went together much faster once I purchased Ortelius. It made constructing maps very easy and straightforward. I was also able to rework my Sketchup skills with a more eloquent 3D rendering.
What I am trying to prove here is that through a spacial analysis of the settlement at Manakin Town that one can determine that the refugees still clung to their French cultural identity, which slowly became integrated into colonial Virginia society. To do this, I looked at where the Huguenots settled, how they planned on establishing their community, and then how things were actually put into place. The last part of the project takes a (mostly incomplete) look at how even their architecture was still predominantly French, until successive generations were born and assumed more English styles. (I could use some help with this, Lindsey!)
Let me know how you think it turned out!
I apologize if my PDF files act strangely, InDesign lumped pages 2 and 3 together, so they look smaller. I will have this fixed for the final project.
So after 2 weeks of struggling in Illustrator to try to make an outline of that complex long plot system, I took the plunge and purchased Ortelius. Wow. It only took me a few hours to complete what has (unsuccessfully) taken me weeks to accomplish. Well worth it!!!
Well, here is my 3D Reconstruction project. After trying numerous different images to draw, trying to find many real (and somewhat fictional) maps, I settled on a guest house that existed on an estate near Manakin Town. I found the image while looking for houses in the area, and it turns out that a single estate, Keswick, still exists largely in its original from from the 1740′s! It also happens to be an American Heritage site, and has its own page in the American Memory part of the LOC site. Here are some of the entries that are listed for the vicinity: LOC American Memory
This was the point where the easy parts were over. The rest of this entire project was a painstakingly arduous process of trial and error, frustration and missing pieces. I will put out a disclaimer right now: Google Sketchup is a very powerful program that was designed for toddlers. At least I feel that way after using it. There are so few options that I became so frustrated with the program I continually oscillated between using a flat city map just so that it was easy and straightforward (I’m looking at you snapping line tools!)
Moving on from my frustrations with Sketchup, I think that my end result turned out rather well, considering someone’s shortcomings (the program, or more likely me). The way that I constructed this model very similar to the wayt hat we put it together in class: I edited and leveled the original photo in Photoshop and imported it into Sketchup as a Match Photo. I then lined up the planes (realizing that the scroll wheel on my trackball zooms in and out with out using the real tool) and was able to accurately place the end markers. This took about a day of tweaking, as my lines were continually askew. After finishing, commenced to outline the front my building, learning how to properly draw along the planes, and how to use the Move tool to my advantage. I became very frustrated trying to match any angle that was not 90 degrees, and it was after using the aforementioned tool, that I was able to make intersections of varying degrees all on the same (green) plane. I finally had the front of my building as a single plane.
I then used the push/pull tool to move my building back into the third plane, which gave it real dimension. This is when I finally began to make progress!!! I could finally envision my building as a real object. Using the Orbit tool, I began to move around the space trying to see what the building looked like. Again, I am not entirely sure of the cause of this, but my building was askew. The further away that the reconstruction was from the central focal point, the longer it seemed once I matched the lines of the picture to the actual model. So what should have been a 4″ roof overhang was over 12″! I decided that for the sake of the project, I was going to modify the dimensions so that it all fit with the closer perspective. I have no idea why it turned out like this, other than the idea that the camera and lens combo that were used to shoot the photo used some foreshortening without realizing it. Oh well.
Now, having the mastery of my tool, putting the chimney and tweaking the dimensions of the house was rather easy. What took me over a week to figure out, I was able to put together in the matter of an hour. Now that I know what I am doing, these beginner models shouldn’t be too hard to reconstruct.
As for what this model actually tells me is again hard to define. After putting together the reconstruction of this house, I went into the online aerial maps to try to find out where this house is. I triangulated (through my online research) where the address of this estate is and went to look for it. There are at least 4 other buildings mentioned: A main house built near 1750 still exists in the center, the original house, now a guest house is also there. It dates to approximately the 1720′s, and is said to have originated from iron-rich bricks that were made on the premises. (See the short bio from the Manakin Genealogical Society’s page here) There is also a fascinating building which was built near the mid century, that housed the slaves that worked the plantation. It is this round building, with 3 chimneys to keep the building warm. The owner of the plantation (who unfortunately was not French after 1749) was a slaveowner and in an Enlightenment fashion, built a slave house that was supposed to resemble their “traditional” housing and was designed to keep them warm, as they were thought to have needed the warmth.
But looking on the aerial maps, this small structure is nowhere to be found. It strongly resembles the other brick buildings both in scale and design, so I assume that it was there at one point. It’s gone!! Judging by the condition of the building when the photo I used was taken, I would not be entirely surprised that the building may have been torn down. Sad, but I cannot find this anywhere in miles around. So, after all of my work I have no context in which to place this small house. I think that if I were able to photograph the rest of the extant plantation that I may be able to better understand how the original French settlers designed their homes and laid out their farmland. The way that the French originally situated themselves in this very foreign land could speak to some of their attitudes towards their migration or their initial establishments. Perhaps I could go back and talk to those who I met last week to figure out who lives there and get permission to photograph the estates as they exist today. I think that this holds a great deal of promise, but I need more data before I can continue!
You may have won this round, Sketchup, but I will have my revenge!!!
EDIT: I think that I may have found the little house, but unless my eyes deceive me, it has been turned into a poolhouse!
I think that the power of the maps as tools became a bit fuzzy, so to speak, during this week’s readings. The Harmon book wasn’t quite as useful for what I am hoping to produce as my final project, as imaginary and personal geography really doesn’t apply to dead people. The take-away’s that I did get from her book are the unique and innovative ways that we can picture time and space, not necessarily in the same scale as the official maps. I felt that personal maps are the difference between an official story, like one one would see on the news versus an eyewitness account of the same story. Both give generally the same facts, but are presented using a different scale and use different colors to present their information. What would be interesting to find is a personal map that was produced from the past relating to my research. Understanding how these people envisioned themselves can be a very insightful methodology, but one that I’m afraid isn’t utilized as much as it could be.
I think that the chapter from Akerman, by Padron also has very interesting implications, albeit not necessarily for my research directly. I felt that the thrust of this article gives an interesting peek inside of the early modern mind, in addition to continuing this concept of how individual map out space whether it is real or imagined. I found the section on the maps of Dante’s 9 rings of Hell particularly interesting. As time progressed, and people became more ‘logical’ and ‘modern’ the maps became more sophisticated. Perhaps this growing desire to order space and Nature also had a corresponding effect in personal geographies?
Switching back to some of the applications of these types of imaginary and personal maps. The entire Cartography 2.0 website deals with the ways that these personal maps can be utilized as teaching tools in the era of Web2.0 and the technology available to us. The chapters presented on the website bring to mind many of the questions I had to ask myself from Clio II, many of which involve interface, access and ease of use for the end user. I think that these kinds of maps will be the most profitable for students in the near future. We were supposed to look at Google Maps and Bing maps for this week as well, and I think that when examined in conjunction with the information presented in Cartography2.0, that we can begin to conceptualize how to create maps to be used on the computers and to teach the upcoming generations.
Again, this seems to be outside of the scope of this class, but how will digital map API’s be used in conjunction with the traditional mapmaking techniques that we have learned so far? As much as I dislike asking questions, I feel that there isn’t a direct answer to what I want to accomplish? When writing my dissertation, will I be able to include a digital map, that displays cartographic information over time? Will I be able to publish my entire thesis digitally, so that my maps and displays are well-integrated? I think that the problems presented by Cartography2.0 are much the of the same that historians are encountering: that the traditional forms of publication and dissemination are not going to be around forever. So, I say let’s move forward in the digital realm and begin to publish maps that are user driven, user oriented and friendly so that both personal and physical space can be mapped efficiently and for the greatest effect!
This week I commented on Cara’s post concerning the way we form our national identities through maps, especially in the age of GPS units, and on Alisa’s blog about the notions of exploration and the formation of identity through our ability to travel using automobiles.
Cartography in the 20th century sure took a sharp turn, didn’t it? The Risk board game map sure doesn’t apply anymore, rather than what we were reading about the 19th century. Not only were multiple and innovative perspectives created, but our perceptions about ourselves as Americans were profoundly changed in ways that were designed by corporations. God bless capitalism?
The way that Americans tended to visualize the nation was changing in the early 20th entury, as James Akerman notices in his chapter concerning road atlases. Now that the national narrative had been completed, and the US stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there was a need to supplant the Manifest Destiny story with another. Railroads had helped to connect the nation, but were soon seen as limiting with the advent of the automobile. Akerman’s thesis is that through the construction of roads suitable for cars, and the construction of a national road system, that Americans began to understand their relation to the land in a different way. But this did not happen spontaneously, rather it was guided by the oil companies whose profits were driven by the consumers, who happened to be automobile drivers. What happened was a growing consciousness of the nation, its features and the routes to get from point A to B, all facilitated by the companies who were there to make a buck.
With the technological advent of flight and the other advances that arose out of WWII and the Cold War, maps and cartography took on an entirely new if not intrinsic importance. Maps now served as both the means and end to technological advances as intelligence reports were became vital to the state. So this is where our work converges with this historiography of maps and modern cartography. The technological advances through the Corona panoramic program have directly benefited us as GIS historians, not as historians of GIS, but as historians who employ GIS-related technology for our own uses. Cloud’s largely technical article uncovers these advances in cartographic understanding, and postulates that were it not for the intense developments in large-scale cartographic understanding (which lead to GIS), a missile may have been fired. While I think that is a bit of a stretch, I agree that were it not for a meticulous understanding of their enemies, both the US and the USSR may have acted entirely differently.
But still, I think that after reading the Schulten and the Akerman, we can begin to understand these technological advances not as the result of the industrial-military complex, but rather from the desire of Americans and other modern Western people to expand their understanding and view of their surroundings and the world. This theme, while adequately summarized in the chapter by Dillion brings up more interesting questions about how corporatism changes the way that we perceive our surroundings, more or less our income and the general state of the economy. (Americans for Prosperity? Yeah right!) I believe that we need to understand the definitive power of maps not as charts of topography and geography, but as tools that tell us about ourselves, and what others want to impress upon the population. I realize that I am sounding like Harley in my rant, but I am beginning to believe that in order to best understand the ways that maps have shaped our perceptions of our surroundings, it is important to understand where and why the maps were produced. Adequately understanding the reason for production is important for any historical source, and is even more important with maps since they are a product of material culture.
This week, I posted on Cara’s blog and on Ruel’s blog.
Tho’ these people are very poor, yet they seem very cheerful.
Posted: October 20, 2010 in UncategorizedSo, if any of you have talked to me at all this semester, I am at the earliest stages of my dissertation work. I am planning on looking at a community of French Protestants who settled at Manakin Town, near what is today Richmond. The land that the 250+ settlers were given through a royal land grant was intended to be in the Norfolk area, but upon their arrival, they were told that they were to settle a land previously occupied by Monocan natives west of the waterfalls on the James River. From my understanding of the formative years of the settlement, even though the land was arable and harvests were good, over half of the initial population perished within 2 years.
What they would have initially came upon was a thickly forested area along the river. Being French, the land that they occupied was divided up into this, long sections. All of the plots back up to the river, as the English hoped that the Huguenots would take place in commerce, as they did at their previous residence, London. These land divisions were doled out relatively equally, but owners did not possess necessarily contiguous plots. The English intercessor to the King, William Byrd, also held the best plot of land in the middle of the grant, which was by far the most flat and easily accessible to the river. Examining the DEM data by itself, it is clear that while the land was relatively flat, it would have been far more difficult to farm these plots in the way that they were arranged. The area of the land grant that lies along the James River, that would have been the most productive were in the hands of Byrd, while most of the French colonists only had a meager amount of flat land to settle upon.
Laying over a topo layer over the DEM data only reinforces this notion, as most of this area is forested still today. The white areas are those that are now open, illustrating how little progress the French and their modern counterparts made when it came to moving deeper into the forest to farm. There is currently a road, which shows up in the 1929 maps, where most of the developed and recognizable land development stops. This is unique, as many of the plots went far further than that road, but any sign of them is no longer present, whereas it is still obvious in the easily manageable land is cultivated even today. The importance of looking at the topo map, is that it includes the local features that currently exist, but rather places the topographical features of the landscape in the context of civilization.
Perhaps one of the most insightful overlays that I constructed was one that included a DOQQ (Digital Orthophoto Quarter-Quadrangle) layer. A DOQQ is a digitally compiled image that combines the visual elements of a photo with the geometric correction of a topographic map. Luckily for us, NSD has an option to use DOQ’s, and it will automatically place the layer exactly over the DEM data! The DOQ data that I used contains an artificial color scheme, which highlights and emphasizes the differences between soil, trees, etc. What the DOQ data reveals is the extent that the land was developed, and some of the remnants of three centuries of agriculture. This map was the most useful when beginning to understand the ways that the French refugees settled in the Americas. The resources that the French refugees had were poor, the land they were given was not easily adaptable to settlement, but they survived and eventually prospered. The rest of the story has yet to have been thoroughly analyzed, yet there are numerous passing references to the French Huguenots at Manakin Town.
Constructing these maps was a far more difficult task than I had originally thought. I began the project well over a week ago, playing around with NSD and trying to understand the “lay of the land”. What I did learn was how to import the DEM elevation maps, as layers from .jpg’s and how to adequately learn how to use the camera angles to illustrate the points that I wanted to highlight. At this moment, I still cannot utilize, or even access, the Light menu or the Background Trees option. For some reason, the OS X version is very picky on both of the machines that I have tried to use. Thus, my plain landscape does not have any trees, which is not from a lack of effort. Trust me.
It was only in the final stages of trying to figure out how these maps can be utilized for historical purposes that I really began to use some of the more advanced features of NSD, including the overlays of DOQ data, and topographic maps. Since the Sanford maps that we have used in class so often have little relevance to my area, using .jpg’s and resizing my data didn’t really help me. I initially started out with a screen shot of a Google Maps overview, and laid it over the topography to moderate success. I was going to use this is one of my examples until I found the DOQ data while searching in vain for the infrared maps we discussed a few weeks back.
I still think that I haven’t yet scratched the surface in terms of successfully using NSD and 3D representations of the area I’m studying. I think that I don’t yet know enough of the area to fully grasp what I need to study or analyze in terms of the topography. For my last shot (which is at 5x vertical exaggeration for effect), I took a shot of what the French settlers may have encountered as they were traveling up the James River in 1700. What the picture shows is an area that appears to be hospitable, but in fact would have been totally foreign to the religious refugees placed at the edge of the known world in the colonial wilderness.
They were described by Franz Louis Michel, a Swiss geologist in 1702, “Tho’ these people are very poor, yet they seem very cheerful.” The rich soil of interior Virginia was rewarding their efforts, and the French were beginning to integrate into the colonial frontier. Within 50 years of their arrival, most historians claim that they had completely integrated into English colonial society and were indistinguishable from their English neighbors.
Does anyone know how to add Background trees to their BIL maps? My option to do so is perpetually grayed out.
