Book chapter on metaphors of geography in diagramming time

Pickering and Chatto have recently published Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Beck of Warwick University. They describe the volume:

Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with ‘knowledge’ being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge, including the acceptance of heliocentrism and the use of scripture to refute Descartes's claims in A Discourse on Method (1637). The book comes out of an ongoing project, Scientiae, examining the nexus of Renaissance Europe and the history and philosophy of science.

Contents of the book:

Introduction – David Beck 

Part I: Unity and the Investigation of Nature

• ‘Not a Hundred Sorts of Beasts, Not Two Hundred of Birds’: Universal Language and the Early Modern End of the World – James Dougal Fleming
• The Moral Physiology of Laughter – Stephen Pender
• The Part and the Whole: Architectonics of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century English Thought – Kevin Killeen

Part II: God’s Two Books

• The Use of Scripture in the Beast Machine Controversy – Lloyd Strickland
• Johann Jacob Zimmermann and God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology in Lutheran Germany around 1700 – Mike A Zuber
• The Cosmology of Martinus Szent-Ivany SJ (1633–1705): Some Philological Notes on His Dissertatio Cosmographica Seu de Mundi Systemate – Svorad Zavarský

Part III: Imagination and Reality: Time, Zoology and Memory

• May Not Duration Be Represented as Distinctly as Space? Geography and the Visualization of Time in the Early Eighteenth Century – Stephen Boyd Davis
• Early Modern Natural Science as an Agent for Change in Naturalist Painting: Jacopo Ligozzi’s Zoological Illustrations as a Case Study – Angelica Groom
• ‘Direct Ideas’: The Quotidian Imagination in John Willis’s 1618 Memory Theater – Adam Rzepka

My chapter discusses how the mapping of time in the Eighteenth Century was largely modelled on the mapping of space:

The eighteenth century saw the creation of the modern timeline , a diagrammatic representation of historical time that has since become ubiquitous. The present chapter identifies early examples of the genre and discusses their relationship to other forms of knowledge, analysing the artefacts themselves and the contemporary explanations published by their authors. It extends previous work on the influence of mechanical metaphors and models of cognition to focus here on the complementary influence of geography. Geography and chronology were presented as equal contributors to history from at least the sixteenth century, but what was new in the eighteenth was the proposition that chronology could itself become a kind of geography, offering the possibility of ‘cartographies of time.’ The chapter traces the changing relationship between the two disciplines, set in their cultural context.

Navigating time - diagrams as time machines

Ruth Ewan: We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be, 2011

Marq Smith, editor of the Journal of Visual Culture, asked me to contribute to a symposium connected with the exhibition he has curated, How to Construct a Time Machine, and I offered this: 

Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg described his 16.5 metre diagram in 1753 as "a moving, living tableau, through which pass in review all the ages of the world ... where the rise and fall of Empires are acted out in visible form." Pictorial images of past times seem the most obvious way for us to "travel" in time, evoking the visual characteristics of historical ages. But when the modern timeline was invented in the eighteenth century, diagrams too were promoted as a means to situate ourselves in the past. Images of travel, exploration and international trade were eagerly co-opted as images of historical inquiry.

It allows me to rethink some of the metaphors of geography and cartography, discussed here, as metaphors of travel. Travel around the globe – with exploration, trade and the building of a comprehensive world view in mind – becomes travel through time.  

The Symposium: 

How to Construct a Time Machine 

Tuesday 17 March / 1.30-6pm 

6 Cecil Court, London WC2N 4HE 

The events are organised by curators Marquard Smith, Nina Trivedi and Simon Wright.  With contributions from James Auger (RCA, on robots), Stephen Boyd Davis (RCA, on timelines), Sonya Dyer (Artist, on the future), Katharine Fry(Goldsmiths, on the constant instant), Peter Osborne (Kingston), and Nina Trivedi (RCA, on deep time)

I was glad to see Ruth Ewan (image above), who contributes to the exhibition, echoing the decimal clock of the French Revolution (below).

From Wikipedia: French Republican Calendar

Britten's poets

As part of his work with the Britten-Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, UK, PhD student Florian Kräutli has been developing a new visualisation of the temporal relations between the song-cycles in composer Benjamin Britten’s lifetime of composing and the dates of the poets whose work the composer set.

Detail of a double-timeline representing (top) Benjamin Britten's lifetime and (bottom) the time span of the poets whose work he set.  Florian Kräutli for Britten-Pears Foundation. Screenshot.

It comprises two parallel timelines - a surprisingly under-exploited arrangement that Florian has made good use of before.  The top line shows the composer’s lifetime: circles are song-cycles, the size of the circle representing the number of poems in a given cycle.  The lower line shows all the poets Britten set, the size of the circle representing the number of each poet’s works set. The lateral position shows the date of composition (in the Britten timeline) or the mid-point of the poet’s life (in the longer poet timeline extending as far back as Sophocles).

Clicking on a poet highlights Britten’s settings; clicking on a song cycle highlights all the poets whose words are part of the cycle.

The timeline will be displayed as part of Britten’s Words, an exhibition at The Red House Gallery, Aldeburgh, from 1 May 2015.

Florian is funded by a CASE grant from the EPSRC, awarded by the Creative Industries KTN.

Exhibitions at The Red House Gallery, Aldeburgh.