Twenty-first-century information systems occupy virtual rather than physical space. The structures for collecting, organizing, and storing knowledge that shape our everyday lives depend on *digital technology and *internet access. Linked by a multiplicity of wireless computers, these ethereal networks exist in *the cloud. They are part of a global “information landscape” that is ever more complex, intricate, pervasive, and dense. There is growing demand for electronic tools that analyze and present data geographically. Modes of visualizing and mapping knowledge, geographic information systems have applications in engineering, planning, logistics, telecommunications, business, and scholarship, notably in the fields of archaeology and history. They have proliferated alongside technologies that permit accurate geospatial positioning by receiving satellite signals. Such systems are rapidly superseding maps as the principal means by which we navigate movement through the urban and rural environments that surround us. London black cab drivers study for years to acquire the *encyclopedic “knowledge” of the city’s streets required for a taxi license. But the mental maps of its topography on which they pride themselves are increasingly rivaled by the machine memory of the satellite-navigation devices on which their Uber competitors rely. These inventions are arguably eroding our capacity to orientate ourselves in relation to space, even as they are enhancing the status of virtual space as a key matrix for the interpretation and management of information. And yet material location has always been at the heart of how we conceive, arrange, communicate, and retrieve information. Long before the transformative developments of the last half century, landscapes and cities served as information systems.
The physical environments in which people live and work determine the conditions in which knowledge is circulated. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the continent of Europe and its adjacent islands were predominantly rural. Especially in Italy and the Low Countries, urbanization was on the increase, driven by commercial and mercantile growth and by economic migration from the countryside of people in search of employment. Tiny in comparison to the huge agglomerations of population that count for cities today, the largest city in 1500 was Naples, with 150,000 people. By 1600 it had been overtaken by Paris, which boasted half a million; in due course this was eclipsed by London, in which some seven hundred thousand people lived by 1750. But the majority still inhabited villages and small settlements surrounded by the agricultural land that provided their livelihoods and hedged about by wild places—mountains, moors, forests, and bogs—that proved more troublesome to tame.
Altered by human habitation over several millennia, such landscapes were repositories of folklore, archives of information about customary rights and inherited rules, and storehouses of communal memory. They were littered with natural and human-made landmarks that served to demarcate boundaries and functioned, alongside place names, as a compass for travelers. Ritual perambulation of the parish limits also helped to ingrain geographical knowledge in local communities, and the furrows ploughed in fields established a template for sowing crops in future years. The legends that accumulated around trees, stones, springs, rocky outcrops, and other distinctive topographical features provided pointers to distant and more recent history. In Europe, many were linked with the Christian faith, which left an enduring footprint on the face of the landscape in the guise of places of worship, pilgrimage shrines, wayside crosses, and sites hallowed by association with local saints. A canvas filled with hagiographical information, the material world was an important mnemonic tool in contexts in which the majority were illiterate. Popular perceptions of the past in the premodern period were more closely tied to location than date. A sense of place took precedence over precise identification of chronology, hence the many mythical stories that accumulated around prehistoric megaliths, burial mounds, and barrows.
Such traditions were transmitted down the generations by word of mouth, which was also the principal medium by which news circulated in the countryside. Farmers exchanged it at fairs and markets, and it also penetrated rural areas via seasonal workers and itinerant tradesmen and salesmen. From the sixteenth century onward, peddlers carried ballads, pamphlets, almanacs, and other inexpensive books in their packs, providing even humble villagers with access to textual knowledge. But acoustic communication continued to play a vital role: church bells were rung to mark deaths and warn of approaching armies. Beacons and bonfires were other devices for alerting neighboring communities to impending danger, and lighthouses served the same purpose for ships off treacherous stretches of coastline. In seventeenth-century north Yorkshire, Catholics devised an ingenious system of semaphore: white sheets were laid out to dry on sloping fields and hedges to signal to the faithful members of this persecuted minority where Mass would next be celebrated. Without local knowledge, it was easy to get lost. Anti-invasion measures ordered by the Ministry of Information in World War II Britain included the removal of signposts and milestones to confuse the enemy.
As an information system, the landscape is never static but in constant flux. The rise of capitalist agriculture and the advance of enclosure, for instance, profoundly transformed its physical appearance, obliterating features that were fillips to local memory. Drives for “improvement” in the form of reclaiming land from the sea and draining fenland likewise eroded the knowledge encoded in the local environment, as did mining, quarrying, deforestation, and later major engineering schemes to create dams and reservoirs. No less corrosive in its effects was the Protestant *Reformation. Especially in countries that embraced Calvinism, this was accompanied by a war against idols. Iconoclastic destruction of monuments of “superstition” and sites of pagan veneration combined with natural processes of weathering and decay to reduce redundant architectural structures such as monasteries to crumbling ruins. Sacred landscapes became secular ones, migrating from ecclesiastical into lay possession and becoming arenas in which the social elite displayed their status and power. Catholic reformers responded by rehabilitating battered shrines and by creating new holy places, including vast spiritual theme parks such as Mont Valérien in France, where devout visitors prayed in an array of chapels and tableaux that reconstructed Christ’s route to Calvary.
The damage done by military conflict and revolution further eroded the landscape as a repository of inherited memory, even as it overlaid it with new connotations. *Early modern wars left ecological scars, though these pale in comparison with the devastation wrought by artillery and bombing in modern times. Battlefields from Bosworth and Naseby to the flat fields of Flanders, where thousands of World War I soldiers lie in official cemeteries close to where they fell, serve as memorials to the dead, admonishing present and future generations to give thanks for their sacrifice and preserve the peace for which they paid so high a price.
European projects of colonization and conquest were likewise often accompanied by the deliberate destruction and alteration of physical environments, the obliteration of which was a symbol of triumph over a rival information order. In Ireland, plantation was a process designed to efface Gaelic culture; in the New World, the curiosity of initial encounters gave way to aggressive campaigns of imperialism and acculturation that entailed the demonization of Indigenous knowledge. Colonial violence could not, however, entirely efface the capacity of subjugated native peoples to remember through the land. In North and South America and Australia, the *vernacular, nontextual memories of displaced Indian and aboriginal tribes have remained resilient. In these ways, the landscape was and is a field in which ideological and territorial politics are visibly played out. More recent examples of this ongoing phenomenon include the destruction of Buddhist shrines in Afghanistan by the Taliban and the huge red-and-white flag emblazoned on the mountain overlooking the divided city of Nicosia in Cyprus, laying claim to Turkish sovereignty over the northern part of the island.
From the fifteenth century, the growth of *literacy and the advent of the mechanical press converged with other processes to inspire attempts to transfer the information system enshrined in the medieval landscape onto paper and into print, lest it be lost in oblivion. Environmental change and human-made disaster served as powerful stimuli to recording and writing. Revived in the course of the *Renaissance, the classical tradition of chorography was itself rooted in a spatial theory of knowledge. It reflected an intellectual outlook in which geography was regarded as the eye of history and its inseparable twin and in which memory was frequently imagined as a theater or palace. Early modern antiquarianism fostered the compilation and publication of many “surveys,” “perambulations,” and “itineraries.” From Petrarch onward, it facilitated archaeological excavation of the ancient past, “re-membering” it by reassembling its fragments and traces. The product of book learning as well as active fieldwork, the texts these impulses generated were structured in ways that underlined the idea that information had a location and that the past was a place that it was possible to inhabit in the imagination. The prospects, drafts, and engravings with which these texts were illustrated were another way of making topographical knowledge visible, and of reproducing the experience of visiting these living repositories of history for the armchair traveler. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch word landschap denoted a *genre of painting: a scene viewed from the perspective of a particular spectator. Only later did it come to be used to describe actual places rather than their two-dimensional simulacra. The disappearing legacy of popular “antiquities” collected and written down by aristocratic, gentry, and clerical compilers was similarly filtered through a lens that fundamentally distorted it.
The same observations apply to the growing impulse to map the landscape. Assisted by its sister arts of surveying and mathematical measuring, cartography was another critical mechanism for representing geographical information. Far from neutral and objective depictions of space, maps must be understood as subjective projections of authority. An instrument of reconnaissance and governance, the map is a semiotic system that reflects the aspirations of those who create it and that turns them into pictorial truths. Linked with the commodification of land for monetary gain and with the pretensions of expanding nation-states and empires, mapping at all levels—continent, country, region, and private estate—occluded alternative ways of delineating the landscape. It suppressed the cartographies of subaltern and dispossessed peoples, laid claim to contested frontiers, and reordered the center and periphery in ways that vindicated particular political and administrative objectives. Early modern mapmaking also helped to construct geographical contrasts that reified hierarchies of knowledge: subordinating east to west, and locating it backward in time as well as in space. The “dark corners of the land” and “Indies within our midst” whose ignorance flummoxed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops were compared with heathen places in a manner that instinctively linked civilization and *enlightenment with the art of cultivation. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany the settlements of “healthy” Saxons were similarly contrasted with the wastelands inhabited by “indolent” Slavs and “parasitic” Jews. Such racial assumptions laid the foundations for Nazi ethnic cleansing.
The idea that the environment determines human behavior also found expression in the cities that early modern Europeans built in Latin America. Models of symmetry based on rectangular grids, their layout was a strategy for discipline and socialization: Spanish reduccíons in the Andes were spatial manifestations of the desire to create order out of diabolical chaos. Others had avenues radiating from a central square that provided clear sightlines from every direction. Perhaps the most perfect realization of this ideal was the Venetian military outpost of Palma Nuova established in 1593. Town planning of this kind was itself a device for maximizing the gathering of information by observation.
Most medieval cities, however, had grown up more haphazardly. A tumble of houses in a maze of meandering lanes and streets, they were full of hidden nooks and crannies and encrusted with multiple sedimentary layers of memory and meaning. Warfare and fire sometimes provided opportunities for clearance and rebuilding, as in London following the great conflagration of 1666, while the reconfiguration of Rome in the sixteenth century was a papal project embodying the pretensions of the resurgent Counter-Reformation Church. The steady growth of some cities as a result of economic migration, mercantile prosperity, and later industrialization presented significant challenges to the capacity of their inhabitants to gain a mental map of them in their entirety. Comprehending these sprawling metropolises became increasingly difficult, providing an incentive for portable directories and guidebooks that substituted for firsthand knowledge of their topography and buildings. The pocket companion compiled by William Stow in 1722, for instance, was designed to meet the needs of coachmen and porters in London, Westminster, and Southwark and to prevent deliveries from going astray, their suburbs and liberties having become so expansive that no one was familiar with every inch of them. Robert Kirk, the Scottish visitor who commented in 1690 that the city was “a great vast wilderness” articulated a sentiment that must have been widely shared.
Cities and towns progressively ceased to be face-to-face communities and became conglomerations of strangers living in discrete and disaggregated neighborhoods, but they maintained their status as engines and exchanges of information. Hotspots for literacy and the headquarters of the printing industry, they engendered a range of other institutions associated with the production and dissemination of textual knowledge: bookshops, libraries, archives, schools, academies, and universities. The birthing chambers of serial newspapers, they engendered and sustained a host of professional scribes, notaries, writers, and journalists. They also spawned sites of sociability and spaces in which public opinion about current affairs was regularly aired: from inns, taverns, *coffeehouses, and *salons, to pharmacies and barber shops, squares and piazzas. Inquisitive Londoners in search of gossip and rumor walked up and down the aisles of St. Paul’s Cathedral and haunted the Royal Exchange. Oral information circulated freely alongside manuscript tracts, printed broadsides, and petitions, which were pinned or pasted to prominent landmarks to attract attention. The pinning of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses on the church door in Wittenberg may be a retrospective invention, but the posting of government proclamations in public places was a standard technique for releasing information in urban settings. Large cities such as Venice, Cologne, and Hamburg functioned as resonating boxes in which information moved back and forth across different media and across the porous boundaries between the literate and illiterate.
By contrast, the information flows that linked early modern Istanbul with Western capitals via ambassadors, diplomats, scholars, and traders were largely oral and epistolary. Increasingly cosmopolitan in character, cities were entrepôts into and from which knowledge was imported and exported by road and water, paper and whispers. They were crossroads for interchange between cultures. Established as an encampment in 1575, Luanda, capital of modern-day Angola, was a hub of Portuguese imperial power and a major port of embarkation for slaves at which African and Atlantic circulatory networks converged. But cities were sites of apartheid as well as coexistence and diversity. A strategy for preventing ideological contamination and facilitating surveillance, the physical segregation of the religious and racial minorities who resided within them also served to control and channel the passage of information. In Nagasaki in Japan, meticulous documentation of the illicit Christian population between 1665 and 1871 was a mode of inquisition and coercion by the Tokugawa shogunate.
Everywhere urban information systems relied on the senses of both sight and sound. Medieval and early modern cities were auditory environments, filled with street sellers, minstrels, town criers, and open-air pulpits. Bells regulated the division of the day into times of work and play and, together with drums and cannons, signaled the nightly curfew, though new technologies such as personal watches and newspapers gradually superseded these functions and the level of noise from traffic and machines increased. As in the countryside, physical landmarks such as prominent buildings and symbolic shop signs were aids to navigation. Increasingly, though, cities became spaces into which visible words penetrated and by which they were saturated. Though it had a precursor in ancient Rome and Greece, the reemergence of a public “graphosphere” began in Renaissance Italy and spread steadily across the continent, reaching Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially, inscriptions on stone slabs, façades, and pillars carried the voice of princes, tsars, rulers, and oligarchs; supplementing if not superseding the theatrical and ceremonial spectacles for which the streets provided a regular stage, they were emanations of political authority. Later, they proliferated for commercial and practical purposes and, in the guise of graffiti, were a tool of protest and resistance. As the state stretched its tentacles into the lives of its citizens, it devised more mathematical methods of gathering information about them. House numbers replaced names as a more efficient mechanism for taking censuses and levying taxation. This also facilitated the development of modern postal systems, which delivered letters to the door of individual residences and businesses, sometimes twice daily.
Finally, it is necessary to focus attention on movement between different locations as a mode of obtaining and conveying information. Circulation must be understood in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. Whether on foot or horseback, by carriage, boat, homing pigeon, car, train, or plane, mobility has always been integral to the creation and spread of information. Pilgrims, merchants, migrants, and missionaries were key mediators and brokers, translating it linguistically and physically into new settings and bringing it into contact with other cultures. A sense of disorientation is a prerequisite for the forging of knowledge. The speed with which ideas and news traveled along paths and roads, canals, rivers, and oceans before the nineteenth century was slow by comparison with that enabled by railways and by mechanized transport and flight. In turn, the inventions of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and internet have led to an exponential increase in how quickly news and ideas can be transmitted around the globe. They have enabled us to transcend the tyranny of distance, be in different time zones simultaneously, and explore locations in every continent vicariously. The very terms we use to describe how we interact with the *World Wide Web, from surfing to superhighways, are resonant of the centrality of space and place to the way in which we conceptualize and acquire information.
Alexandra Walsham
See also art of memory; bells; bureaucracy; commodification; globalization; governance; maps; networks; public sphere; travel