From Space Into Time

As I’ve mentioned in my posts on Zettelkasten, I have begun an open-ended research adventure. Two months into this journey, I have figured out that I want to do history — a shift for me from being a spatial data analyst of present-day conditions to tracing threads in the past. In some ways this is coming full circle for me, since my route into the field of geography involved a deep dive into the concept of landscape and landscape history.

What sort of history and where? The where is most likely California, since I grew up here and live here and travel to archives is easier (I today learned about an online collation of some 60,000 collection guides to more than 350 archives in the state). As for what, some combination of historical geography and environmental history and cultural history, perhaps with an eye looking out towards the Pacific and histories of that ocean. It will be many, many months before I converge on a topic, especially since I have to bootstrap learning how to do history as I go along.

Here’s a thread I learned about this evening while watching one of my doubly-subtitled Catalan videos. I knew that the first governor of Alta California, Gaspar de Portolà, was from Catalunya. (My junior high school was named after Portolà.) This video was a short presentation on Occitan influence in the New World. It turns out Portolà’s family was from Arties in the Vall d’Aran, which is this little Occitan enclave up in the Pyrenees of Catalunya. There’s a restaurant named after the family there.