Katherine
MCDONOUGH

SCIENTIFIC PROJECT

If millions of maps have been printed since the Renaissance, now a significant portion of these are available in digital collections, opening opportunities for treating map collections “as data” in ways that have never existed. Creating data from these maps and linking this data with other primary sources opens new horizons for multimodal historical research. While we now have prototype tools for automatically and manually creating and curating large datasets of text on scanned, historical maps, this fellowship would provide an intellectual space in which to fully translate these technical advances into historical arguments.

The MapText project is radical in its combination of AI and humanities concerns, at a time when many historians continue to struggle to embrace computational methods as core skills for the historians of the future. With this project, I aim not only to write about what we can learn as historians from the contents of maps and their links to other media, I also hope to model how and why historians should critically engage with computational methods.

BIOGRAPHY