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Time, Space, and the Itinerary

Mapping the Siege of Jerusalem

Alyssa McLeod, Author

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Annotated Bibliography

Given this essay's conscious decision to privilege time over space in the creation of a model of a digital itinerary, I have annotated the sources from my Works Cited list that examine temporality and the timeline.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. In Book 11 of the Confessions, St. Augustine speculates about the nature of the past, present, and future, concluding that time only exists "in the sense that it tends towards non-existence" (11.17). Events as the human mind perceives them exist only in the present; when one recollects the past, he or she imaginatively constructs the event in the present time, and when one predicts the future, he or she in fact reads the signs of the future in the present. Time, then, is a function of memory.

Brown, Susan. "Speculative Timelines." The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada. CWRC/CSÉC, 1 Dec. 2010. Web. 7 Mar. 2012. Explaining that the majority of digital timeline tools do not acknowledge the subjective aspect of memory, Susan Brown lays out a research plan with the aim of visualizing memory, speculation, and conflicting accounts of historical events. Brown outlines her methodology in great detail, a process that includes a literature survey of visual timelines, the creation of a prototype, and qualitative studies that include interviews and focus groups.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Medieval Identity Machines. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print. Chapter 1 of Medieval Identity Machines, titled "Time’s Machines," explores the complexity of the medieval understanding of time from a theoretical perspective informed by the work of Bruno Latour, Stephen Hawking, and St. Augustine, among others. Cohen argues for the "conceptualization of [medieval] time as unbounded middle," an attitude reflected by the period name "the Middle Ages" but also evident in the writing of medieval authors (21).

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print. In "Spatial Stories," Chapter 5 of The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau analyzes the relationship between spatial trajectories and narrative structures: every story, he concludes, involves travel. The "tour," or itinerary, then, is a descriptive, temporal, and even narrative means of understanding space.

Deliyannis, Deborah Mauskopf. "Year-Dates in the Early Middle Ages." Time in the Medieval World. Ed. Chris Humphrey and W.M. Ormrod. York: York Medieval P, 2001. 5-22. Print. Summarizing the various dating systems in use in pre-Modern Europe, Deliyannis posits that medieval historians adopted the BC/AD system of continuous years not in order to place events on a timeline, but to avoid the politically volatile associations of other dating systems. Our current system of naming years from Christ's incarnation was at the time of its adoption in the seventh century a politically neutral way of telling the time.

Drucker, Johanna. SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print. Chapter 2.1 of Speclab, "Temporal Modeling," is Drucker's account of her temporal research with Bethany Nowviskie at the University of Virginia. Drucker summarizes her methodology, research questions, and prototype outcomes in detail, dividing diagrammatic representations of time into three categories: "linear, planar, and spatial" (49).

Humphrey, Chris. "Time and Urban Culture in Late Medieval England." Time in the Medieval World. Ed. Chris Humphrey and W.M. Ormrod. York: York Medieval P, 2001. 105-17. Print. Analyzing the introduction of the mechanical clock to the medieval town of York in the fourteenth century, Humphrey posits a connection between the chimes of a clock and embodied, subjective time. The bells that would ring at equal intervals in medieval York would create bodily vibrations in the town's residents, who would structure their days accordingly.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print. This paper relies on Lefebvre extensively for spatial analysis, but in The Production of Space he also addresses the inseparability of time and space. Time, he explains, has more impact than space on the human daily experience, but has vanished from the modern understanding of the social sphere: time has been "murdered by society" (96).

Rockwell, Geoffrey, Sean Gouglas, Harvey Quamen, Victoria Smith, and Sophia Hoosien. "The (Un)reality of the Timeline." CHA 2010. Concordia U, Montreal. June 2010. Conference paper. In the notes for this conference paper, available here, Rockwell and his colleagues trace their attempt to create a timeline of documents from the "formative years of humanities computing in Canada" in the 1980s and 1990s (2). Speculative timelines are key to this process because the beginnings of a discipline lie in the "desires and needs articulated at the time" as much as the actual events (3).

Wood, David. "Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75.4 (1985): 510-21. JSTOR. Web. 20 Feb. 2012. Providing a geographer's perspective on medieval mapping techniques, Wood suggests that medieval mappa mundi function to provide a "visual narrative of Christian history cast in a geographical framework" (519). Maps, then, represent "historical aggregations" as much as spatial realities (519).
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