Preliminary Programme

Wed 4 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 5 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30
    19.00 - 20.15
    20.30 - 22.00

Fri 6 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 7 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 17.00

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Wednesday 4 April 2018 14.00 - 16.00
J-3 SPA01 Urban HGIS
MST/OG/010 Main Site Tower
Network: Spatial and Digital History Chair: Douglas Brown
Organizers: - Discussant: Ivo Zandhuis
Justin Colson : Digital Urban Mapping in Research-Led Teaching
This paper reflects on the development of a project to pilot a digital mapping project on the historic town of Colchester, Essex, in parallel with the development of a linked undergraduate digital history module. Colchester has long claimed to be ‘Britain’s oldest recorded town’, and while archaeologists have explored its ... (Show more)
This paper reflects on the development of a project to pilot a digital mapping project on the historic town of Colchester, Essex, in parallel with the development of a linked undergraduate digital history module. Colchester has long claimed to be ‘Britain’s oldest recorded town’, and while archaeologists have explored its Roman heritage in great depth, its later history has been rather neglected in comparison. In collaboration with Colchester Borough Council, a pilot project has set about digitising historic maps, while a new University of Essex second year undergraduate option module invites students to interact with these maps and develop individual research projects based on an aspect of the town’s history. Combining research and teaching in this way has both provided an opportunity to very successfully engage students in genuinely research-led learning, and provided a kick-start to the project. Students have used ESRI ArcGIS Online StoryMaps to construct a variety of innovative and imaginative map-based projects, ranging from a reconstruction of the lost fortifications of Colchester’s 1648 siege, to a multimedia story of a 1930s policeman’s career told by combining oral history with a tour of a map of his beat. These projects have already served to generate vectorised geodata, highlight the range of research that can be communicated through the available maps, and provoke interest and garner support from the local community. (Show less)

Vanni D'Alessio : Crowdsourcing Map for the Analysis and Representation of the History of a Contested City: the Case of 19-20th Century Rijeka/Fiume
Rijeka is a Croatian harbor city, once better known as Fiume, and during the 19th and 20th centuries it was part of the Austrian, of the Hungarian, of the Italian and of the Yugoslav state, and very briefly has been independent as a free city state. During these two centuries ... (Show more)
Rijeka is a Croatian harbor city, once better known as Fiume, and during the 19th and 20th centuries it was part of the Austrian, of the Hungarian, of the Italian and of the Yugoslav state, and very briefly has been independent as a free city state. During these two centuries Rijeka/Fiume has been a contested and divided city, with people expressing themselves in different languages and dialects, but showing also a degree of common cultural traits and habits. The histories of the city have also been contested, according to the ideology and the national identification of who wrote them. The aim of this paper is not to present a linear and uncontested historical narrative of Rijeka, but to discuss a Google based map that has been created by a group of scholars from the Universities of British Columbia and of Rijeka, whose intention was to represent the complexity of the city’s multi-cultural facets and the shared and conflicting narratives and perceptions of its past.
Two Historians and a Geographer from the Universities of British Columbia and of Rijeka have worked to create an interactive historical map, which uses a web platform (Geolive, a participatory mapping tool that uses Google maps) to crowd-source the knowledge, the personal and collective memories and the historical narratives on the city. The map is one of the products of the scholarly project “Cities and Regions in Transition after the Second World War” and has first appeared on line in 2016 at the address https://rijekafiume.geolive.ca/themap. The access to the map is free. Students from the University of Rijeka have started to work on it, but anyone can place a marker on a particular place or object in town with a description, a story, a memory, a picture, a video or audio clip. The map has the potential to provide a platform for discussions on different transcultural experiences and views of the past of a city, whose buildings, monuments, schools, industries, and streets have repeatedly changed name, profile, identity and scope.
The intention of the map’s creators was to offer an open and visible public space on which some of the city’s different cultural traits would appear, and some elements of its contested and conflicting narratives would come to surface, since they still inform the perceptions of the past of the present-day inhabitants of Rijeka, of its former inhabitants, of the descendants of the emigrants, and of the city’s occasional visitors.
In this paper I will discuss the results of two years of crowd-source participation to the map and the ways in which the project fellows have promoted the map and how or to what extent the results matched the intentions. To what extent, the map is able to show the overlapping layers of the city and to visualize the intersections and interrelations in time and space? (Show less)

Alessandra Ferrighi : The Venetian Ghetto in the Early 19th Century. Urban Transformations over Space and Time
On the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, the Ghetto gates went up in flames, ending three centuries of Jewish segregation. Today’s Ghetto is a far cry from how it looked then: the Ghetto Nuovo circled by porticoed houses rising to nine floors, the Ghetto Vecchio a maze of ... (Show more)
On the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, the Ghetto gates went up in flames, ending three centuries of Jewish segregation. Today’s Ghetto is a far cry from how it looked then: the Ghetto Nuovo circled by porticoed houses rising to nine floors, the Ghetto Vecchio a maze of narrow alleys. Reconstituting with digital technology the 19th-century transformations, from a close analysis of the sources, I arrived at a snapshot of the Ghetto when the gates came down. Moving backwards in time, trawling through the copious documentation, adding and subtracting buildings and calli, we were able to achieve via 3D modelling a comprehensive image of the enclosure, which was then shown in video form at the Venice, the Jews and Europe 1516-2016 exhibition in the Ducal Palace in Venice (closed November 2016). By ensuring an accessible and readily understandable reading of urban phenomena in relation to changes over time, we have, we believe, achieved our aim of making available findings that would otherwise remain between the covers of history books.
The aims of my research were twofold. First, to present an overall picture of the transformations over time of a unique area in the city of Venice, on the basis of the sources analysed. And second, to provide basic material for future investigations into earlier phases before the opening of the Ghetto gates, in historical epochs for which the sources are very fragmentary. (Show less)

Rogier van Kooten, Iason Jongepier : A Socio-spatial Reconstruction of Early Modern Antwerp: Linear Referencing Leads the Way!
In their 2014 History Manifesto Guldi and Armitage provide a passionate argument for the huge societal relevance of historical data and long-term analysis, when combining new digital ways of data-analysis with in-depth historical contextualization of these data. This is precisely what GIStorical Antwerp II aims to do: creating a spatial ... (Show more)
In their 2014 History Manifesto Guldi and Armitage provide a passionate argument for the huge societal relevance of historical data and long-term analysis, when combining new digital ways of data-analysis with in-depth historical contextualization of these data. This is precisely what GIStorical Antwerp II aims to do: creating a spatial digital infrastructure that contains and presents four centuries of Antwerp’s history in a social-spatial context by using a Historical Geographical Information System (HISGIS). (https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/gistorical-antwerp/)
As long as HISGIS projects cover 19th and 20th century (city)landscapes, cadastral maps usually deliver the necessary keys (parcel or house numbers) to plot historical data in space. In recent years, like several other HISGIS projects in the Low Countries, GIStorical Antwerp created a 19th century micro level city in GIS: (http://www.hisgis.nl/hisgis/gewesten/antwerp/antwerpenkaarten)
However, it becomes more difficult when the scope is extended to the early modern or medieval period. House numbers were usually non-existent at those moments in time and the geographical representation by contemporary maps cannot always be trusted. Only in very rare occasions do archives provide pre-cadastral sources like the book of streets and canals of Leiden put together in 1585. To circumvent this problem, GIStorical Antwerp uses a combination of neighborhood registers, tax records, census data and a method called linear referencing in GIS for a micro level reconstruction of the inner-city and its surroundings in 1584, 1667, 1704 and 1755. These new layers will be automatically linked to the already existing ones of the 19th and 20th century. The first part of this paper will discuss our method and present our results.
In order to test the GIStorical Antwerp infrastructure, additional research has focused on the socio-spatial characteristics of the early modern environmental history of Antwerp. In the second part of the paper, several case studies will be presented e.g. the examining of environmental complaints and conflicts of Antwerp’s inhabitants and the specific ordinances and tax policies of the city council. The realization of GIStorical Antwerp II creates the opportunity to examine these topics not only in a socio-spatial context but also against the background of profound economic and demographic developments during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. (Show less)



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