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Photogrammar is a digital cartography project that maps upwards of 170,000 photos taken by photographers for the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information between 1935 to 1945. This ‘Great Depression to World War II’ time period has given birth to some of the most recognizable photographs in United States history. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the map comes to us from a team at Yale University.
The map is easy to navigate with a straightforward narrative, which I address below. Progressing forward isn’t so much of a journey that the user would feel discouraged to back out and select another location. The visual aspects of the map give a sense of technological success without feeling intimidating. The user literally receives a visual of the past in a way that is familiar (use of a map) yet completely different than traditional ways of studying history.
This project clearly states two things due to how we must interact with the map. It argues that photography is an important way to document history, and the best way to look at these pictures is by location. The location or space has meaning because of the particular event or action captured in the photograph. There are two ways to view the map: by county (as shown above); darker green counties contain larger amounts of photographs, or by photographer; each photographer has a colored dot assigned to them in a particular county. On top of that, the user can narrow change the timeframe, search for a picture, and even view a classification tree of the photographs in the Labs section. In chapter 2 of Mobile Stories Brett Oppegaard and Dene Grigar talk about a narrative structure that “functions as a basic cognitive means of organizing human experience and making sense of it…” (Oppegaard and Grigar, 28). Photogrammar successfully carries out this narrative structure defined by Oppegaard and Grigar.
The interactive map looks like a Mercator style projection. Even though this style makes Alaska, which is not shown in the above picture due to the initial zoom of the map when the page opens, look much larger than the continental United States, I feel that this projection is suitable for this type of project. The intent of the map isn’t to show the correct proportions of the states, but instead, it’s intent is to show the prevalence of images that define United States history during this particular time period. Off of that point, this project would agree with Henri Lefebvre’s idea in “The Production of Space” that space is constructed by what people put there and by how people think of what is in the space (Lefebvre, 12-13). These images convey a message about people and space during this time period.
Furthermore, this project shows the uniqueness of digitizing information. The user can jump from year to year and location to location to see into the past. In “Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference”, Nedra Reynolds mentions that technology is helpful, yet is distances us from our own mental map because we come to rely on it too much (Reynolds, 82). I know that Reynolds is specifically referring to certain situations when she proposed her idea, but I would counter-argue that a map like Photogrammar does the exact opposite of distancing us; it allows us to connect locations that are important to us with images that are important in history.
I am impressed with the statement that this project gives to the user as well as how the user receives this statement; the ease of use due to simple actions and familiarity makes this an effective tool. Users ranging from middle school students to historians could find this map valuable. I would combine the Labs section with the actual map rather than having them separate; I don’t think it would be too much of an extra layer considering that the current layers of the map are few.