Abstract: John Bartram's Observations (1751) details his journey to Onondaga but has been almost universally criticized for its dry tone and near-constant listing of data. This essay brings together approaches of literary history and paleoecology to bring new life to the information Bartram provides – a valuable historical record about environmental changes in the eighteenth century. Computational methods from ecology and the digital humanities help to illustrate Bartram's experience of moving through diverse ecosystems on the journey. Visualizations of this historical tree data is imprinted with the signal of Indigenous forest management even though Bartram sees his surroundings as unspoiled wilderness.
Stewart et al. (Sun,) studied this question.