Feminist thinkers in geography such as Gillian Rose have identified ways that women operate in different spaces and grids than men. Building on this concept, GIS scholars such as Mei-Po Kwan and Marianna Pavlovskaya have emphasized that fine-scale narrative maps of daily activities and emotions can reveal much about power relations, identity formation, and the development of a sense of place.

Inspired by these ideas, I carried out a case study by mapping household and neighborhood routines in The Diary of Elisabeth Koren. Elisabeth immigrated from Norway to northeastern Iowa in 1853 at the age of twenty-one with her husband Vilhelm, a newly-ordained Lutheran pastor. During the couple’s first year in the United States, Elisabeth kept a diary with remarkably rich and consistent geographic details describing her activities in her new community of Washington Prairie. These details lend themselves well to narrative mapping and GIS analysis.

One of the most common activities Elisabeth describes is walking around her community to exchange goods, make social calls, spend time with others, and find an escape from cramped household quarters. I used a combination of historical maps and modern GIS layers to develop a base map of Washington Prairie, on top of which I was able to sketch the paths of 83 walks mentioned in the diary. The result is a sort of 1850s version of a Strava or Gaia GPS-style activity map. (This and all other figures on this page are from Quinn, S. (2024). Using GIS to Visualize Daily Routines at the Neighborhood and Household Scales: A Feminist Approach Using a Nineteenth-Century Diary. The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 25.)

Categorizing the walks and then generating density surfaces helped with identifying key relationships and events taking shape during this time. For example, the density surface of the “social visits” provides evidence that Elisabeth was developing a friendship with Kari Katterud. The map of walks taken for “leisure with others” show how Elisabeth and Vilhelm often visited the parsonage grounds together to dream about their future home there and check on construction progress. The map of walks taken for exchanging goods or services shows more linkage to the southeast of the community, where several people lived who provided resources or services to the family.

The personal nature of the diary provides a glimpse into the way that Elisabeth felt about the landscape around her. I identified 70 instances of feelings or emotions that Elisabeth mentioned during the walks that could be mapped with reasonable certainty. I then generated regions of positive and negative emotions by classifying these points, generating density surfaces from them, and calculating the difference of those surfaces.

As a beautiful hilltop site of the Koren’s future home, the parsonage grounds is an example of a place with generally positive emotions. In contrast, the area in the center of the map near the Sørland’s home is often an area of negative emotions for Elisabeth because of fatigue, aggressive animals, and consternation at the amount of tree-cutting going on in the area.

During the winter of 1853-54, the Koren’s spent several months boarding with local farmers Erik and Helene Egge and their two young children in a tiny 16 x 14 foot cabin. Elisabeth describes the layout of his home in sufficient detail to attempt a GIS analysis of the ways the different household members used space. Using her description, I used Inkscape software to sketch a base diagram of the home. On top of this, I used GIS linework to place 221 instances of activity mentioned in the text. Side-by-side density surfaces of these lines show starkly different usages of space by each household member, influenced by gender, class, and age.

The most expansive activity surface is that of Helene Egge, who did most of the cooking, cleaning, childcare, and livestock-related chores. Her children’s density surfaces also fill the home, since they were often following their mother around. Elisabeth’s activity surface is much more constrained. As a pastor’s wife and guest, she was not expected to perform physically demanding and dirty farm chores, although she did help with some cooking and childcare. The men in the household, Erik Egge and Vilhelm Koren, were often working elsewhere and spent little time in the cabin other than to eat or sleep. Sometimes Vilhelm sat at the table to study and prepare sermons.

My hope is that this project will inspire readers to think about the ways that diaries and other life writings can be used in tandem with GIS techniques and feminist thought to better understand people’s lived experiences with aspects of identity such as gender, age, and class.

Please see the full article describing this work:

Quinn, S. (2024). Using GIS to Visualize Daily Routines at the Neighborhood and Household Scales: A Feminist Approach Using a Nineteenth-Century Diary. The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 25.

A talk I gave during the early stages of this project is available on YouTube. It includes a map of the Koren’s journey across Wisconsin: Creative Cartography and the Historical Diary: Some Approaches and Experiments

This poster shows some maps of sensations recorded by Elisabeth during the walks: Elisabeth Koren’s Walks: Sensations and Emotions from a Nineteenth-Century Diary