“I like maps because they lie”

by Leora Eisenberg (class of 2020, Slavic major)

“I like maps because they lie,” says Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. “Because they give no access to the vicious truth. Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly, they spread before me a world not of this world.” Szymborka’s words almost echo the theme of the inaugural Princeton University-Herder Institute conference in the digital humanities: digitally mapping Eastern Europe.

 

As an undergraduate, I was, admittedly, intimidated by the professors and graduate students who knew far more about Eastern Europe than I. While some were new to the notion of digital humanities and digital mapping, they certainly knew more about the “analog maps” (as we came to call them during the conference) than I may ever know. That said, the atmosphere was one of learning, rather than one of competition. In a particularly illuminating workshop, we split up into groups and analyzed maps of different genres (e.g. ethnographic, touristic, administrative, etc.) of the same geographical area and tried to determine what distinguished them, what they were revealing, and what they were hiding. In the days after the workshop, I found myself poring over any map I could find, just to practice my newfound “map analysis muscle.”

 

Time in the Herder Institute’s archives was also invaluable! Although my region of interest is not Eastern Europe — it is, rather, Central Asia — it was an excellent foray into archival research. I browsed through all of the maps in their collections that are relevant to my studies, and am now returning to Princeton with a series of question that I will perhaps answer in later research. Learning about digital humanities as a field and all of the ways to incorporate it into my studies was enlightening; I hadn’t even begun to consider the possibilities!

 

With that in mind, I’m looking forward to the year ahead and to all of the work I will do in the sphere of digital humanities, whether it be related to mapping or not. It had better be good, though, because I hope to present it next year when the Herder Institute comes to visit us at Princeton!