Spring Data/Culture Workshop: Search inside maps with MapReader

Spring Data/Culture Workshop: Search inside maps with MapReader

MapReader, which received the 2023 Roy Rosenweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association, is a software library that was designed for humanities research with big digitised map collections. It was developed on the recently concluded Living with Machines project, but it has been created with the wider community of historians in mind as future users.

MapReader allows users to identify concepts of visual interest on maps, and then to define queries for predicting whether those concepts are present on hundreds or thousands of individual sheets. The power of this approach is its flexibility for any number of spatially-driven research questions.

Cultural heritage organisations hold an increasing number of digitised maps among their collections; and yet, while textual material can be explored ‘at scale’ using a number of digital tools and methods, there are few comparable ways to do this with visual sources, including maps.

This workshop aims to bring together historians and others with an interest in using digitised historical map collections as primary sources for digitally-inflected research. By bringing together peers working in this space, we aim to learn about and discuss ways to encourage open research in the humanities through skill development and shared digital resources and infrastructure.

https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/spring-dataculture-workshop-search-inside-maps-mapreader