in its historicity and genealogy
Engagement, description, illustration, ethnography, delineation, cartography.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries chorography was a term used to refer to antiquarian studies of topography, place, community, history, memory. Camden's Brittania (1586) was a classic chorography from the English Renaissance.
With the consolidation of disciplines of space and place in the late eighteenth century, chorography was subsumed under geography and topography.
I am using the term to raise questions again of the way we conceive and how we relate land and inhabitation, critically. And fundamentally to reconnect place and land with the rhetorical features of "memorable places".
Connected terms are deep-mapping and temporal topographies. These refer to the temporal and historiographical character of chorography.
My interest in the contemporaneity of chorography is a key to my support for the project Anglo-American Antiquarians.
"Reflecting eighteenth century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place …"
Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge 2001) page 64-65.
My main research areas are the Greek mainland (see A Chorography of Central Greece)
and currently the English/Scottish border north from Northumberland -
Weblog - http://mshanks.com
... sharing some of my work in the English/Scottish borders.
[rss:http://www.mshanks.com/feed/]
The Snook, Lindisfarne, Northumberland UK - site of old mine workings (?)
Archaeology and the visual More on media and archaeology, this time for the Sawyer seminar at Stanford Humanities Center - Visualizing Knowledge. January 2007.
Landscape, Archaeology, Chorography: encounters in the Scottish borders. A talk at Brown University, December 2006. Here I connect new ideas about media as mode of engagement (see below) with regional and landscape archaeology - sketching out deep-mapping as a project in a contemporary chorography, that old antiquarian genre.
Media as modes of engagement - remarks on antiquarians in the Scottish borders. Society for the Social Study of Science, meetings in Vancouver November 2006. This proposes a radical rethink of how media, new and old, work in scientific disciplines, indeed how we understand media generally. The idea of medium as mode of engagement is worked out here and in several other papers listed below.
See also ichnography, deep-mapping and heretical empirics.
Three Rooms - an experiment in heretical empirics
Routin Lin, Northumberland - 360º panorama and an experiment from Figure and Ground
