Nominalisation

The different scales of history writing

When we write about history, we sometimes tell it like it's a story. We follow characters through their lives as they do the things that had great impact on the course of history.

Here's an example from the life of John Snow, who used a new mapping technique to discover the source of a cholera epidemic in London:

Sadly, by the time Snow arrived at 10 Cross to interview the tailor's surviving children, he was too late. He learned from a neighbor that the entire family—five children and their father—had died in the space of four days. Their late-night thirst for Broad Street water had destroyed them all.

In his mind Snow was already drawing maps. He’d imagined an overview of the Golden Square neighborhood, with a boundary line running an erratic circle around the Broad Street pump. Every person inside that border lived closer to the poisoned well; everyone outside would have had reason to draw water from a different source.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World(2006)

This is good—this narrative style of history writing is engaging, vivid, and easy to read. You almost feel like you're there, part of the action!

But it doesn't work for everything.

For instance, if we wanted to talk about something broader, like the impact John Snow and his map had on the world at large, we'd need a more zoomed-out style of writing:

In effect, Snow had given the death and darkness of the Broad Street outbreak a new kind of clarity. His first map has been rightly celebrated for its persuasiveness, and variations of it have been reproduced in countless textbooks of cartography, information design, and public health.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World(2006)

Notice how it feels a bit "stepped back"? You're not in the action, up close to John Snow, anymore; you're like a timeless ghost, watching from above.

What if you wanted to step even further back?

What if you didn't want to talk about one particular man and his map, but instead wanted to talk about the history of mapping in general?

You'd need a writing style more like this

In recent years, there has been much discussion of participatory mapping and the democratization of cartography. Today participatory mapping is usually considered a product of the GIS era as it involves groups of people who gather information that is then mapped using GIS. The democratization of cartography refers to anyone with a computer being able to make a map; thus, maps are no longer the sole province of the "professionals".

Women in American Cartography: An Invisible Social History(2019)
What do you notice immediately about this snippet compared to the other two? What stands out as different?

It's more abstract

There isn't just a change in scale from personal ("John Snow made a map") to broad ("People think computers made map-making more accessible to the masses"). There is also a change in the level of abstraction:

  • Snippet 1 is very concrete. We have John Snow, the line on the map, the Broad Street pump, the poisoned well... You can picture all these things in your mind.
  • Snippet 2 has a couple of concrete details, like Snow and his map, but instead of the pump and the poisoned well, we have 'the Broad Street outbreak', and other abstractions like 'persuasiveness' and 'public health'.
  • Snippet 3 is almost completely abstract. Instead of any specific map, we have the category of 'participatory mapping'. Instead of specific people talking to each other, we have 'discussion'. We don't even have specific dates—instead it's 'the GIS era'.

Which also makes it harder to read

You might also have noticed that the more abstract the writing is, the more 'complicated' and 'hard to read' it feels. But there are reasons authors sometimes choose to write in this way, and we'll explore a couple in this lesson.

It's good to be able to think and write about movements, events and ideas that affect the world at large!

However, it requires some skills that go beyond our more everyday, narratively-oriented way of speaking and writing.

In this lesson, we're going to look at one very important way history and social science writers create the zoomed-out perspective that lets them talk about big ideas and trends: nominalisation, or the art of turning events into things.

Previous page