"For historians, one of the hardest tasks is convincing students (or, really, any audience) to let go of the stuff they know in order to think like people in the past," Ralph said. "It might be a scientific theory well-established today but not yet conceived in the time in question; a moral viewpoint regarded as ‘natural’ today, but not at all obvious long ago; or, simply, the knowledge of consequences, of what happened next. In my classes, I often ask students to imagine how cities have changed over time. Neighborhoods that seem ageless are often less than two hundred years old. Istanbul, for example, modernized heavily in the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1838 and 1908, the population of Istanbul doubled; the city expanded, filling up its empty spaces; and, in the wake of a series of fires (in particular the Hocapașa fire of 1865), roads were widened and streets straightened, imposing new order on the urban landscape."

Ralph is using the Auburn University Libraries’ Liquid Galaxy screen to help fuel his students’ imaginations, exploring the past in detail and making concrete comparisons in his project titled Paper Landscapes: Antoine-Ignace Melling’s view of Istanbul, 1809-1819.

Paper Landscapes transports its viewers back to Istanbul of the early nineteenth century (which Melling still referred to as Constantinople). Melling was a young German artist and architect employed by Ottoman Sultan Selim III. When he left Istanbul, he moved to Paris. There, he started work on publishing the Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore. His work was a beautiful portrait of the city in 48 image plates, ranging from expansive urban landscapes to closer, sometimes intimate, pictures of particular buildings and streets.

Auburn University Libraries’ Liquid Galaxy screen allows Ralph to present a global look at each of these plates. Each of Melling’s views of Istanbul has its own display, accompanied by text sharing insight into the detail Melling and his collaborator, the writer and historian Charles Lacretelle, chose to add to the scene; and a Google map zoomed in on the point from which the view was sketched. Where possible, the display also provides a contemporary photograph of the same view taken from the same vantage point. The map thus allows its user to navigate the early nineteenth-century city of Istanbul as Antoine-Ignace Melling saw it and drew it. At the same time, it draws awareness to the ways in which the city has fundamentally changed in the two hundred years since he was on the spot.

Even in the early nineteenth century, Melling’s Voyage pittoresque was set up to facilitate this exploration of city landscape. The Parisian publishers of Melling’s work, Treuttel and Würtz, contracted the geographer Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage in 1815 to create a map plotting the various points from which Melling had drawn his views. A series of separate displays will invite students to explore this process, highlighting the contracts drawn up to secure Barbié du Bocage’s services in 1815, original drafts of which are in Auburn University’s Special Collections and Archives.

Paper Landscapes is a project still in development. Phase one is the re-creation of Melling’s landscapes on the screen. In phase two, either through study abroad or internet crowd-sourcing, Ralph plans to match Melling’s views of the city to contemporary photographs taken from the same perspective.

"Replicating Melling’s views will not be straightforward – some of them, at least so it appears, were sketched from on top of a very high ladder! Whether or not it is possible to capture the same view, there is much to be learned in the attempt: about how early nineteenth century subjects like Melling engaged with city landscapes, and about the ways that landscapes are contingent to their context and invested with specific social and intellectual meanings."