Workshop 2: Dr. Katherine McDonough, ‘Maps as [Open] [Humanities] Data: From Access to Analysis’

Dr. Katherine McDonough (The Alan Turing Institute) presented her paper ‘Maps as [Open] [Humanities] Data: From Access to Analysis‘ at the second AEOLIAN workshop ‘Reimagining Industry / Academic / Cultural Heritage Partnerships in AI’ on Monday 25th October 2021.

Abstract: Creating data from maps means transforming visual and text content from images of scanned map sheets so that it can be processed computationally. Automatic, rather than manual, ‘datafication’ makes it possible to work with large numbers of maps. In this talk I will share experiments using MapReader, the pipeline created by Living with Machines (at The Alan Turing Institute in London) for asking questions of thousands of maps. Along the way, I reflect on what it means for historical maps to be open data, why creating a humanistic approach to computer vision matters, and how new interdisciplinary collaborations make it all possible.