22nd July 12:10 – 12:25
Speaker: Dr Katherine McDonough
Abstract: Historical maps – from planning documents to national cadastres – are increasingly being scanned and shared as digital image collections. It is tempting to treat all representations of past landscapes as truthful reflections of built and natural environments, but experts in historical cartographic genres know that maps are not mirrors, nor do they follow the same rules as more recent earth observation imagery. In this talk, I demonstrate how the careful application of computer vision tools can help researchers, policy makers and land managers interrogate big, historical map data while remaining sensitive to the complexities of these sources.
Bio: Katherine McDonough is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Lancaster University. She is a historian of eighteenth-century France and a specialist in the spatial digital humanities. She founded the MapReader software library with colleagues at The Alan Turing Institute and continues to lead this initiative to work with historical maps as data.