Maps and the Horizons of AI in the Humanities

Join the Humanities Center for a conversation on AI with Katherine McDonough. 

AI is changing the role of maps as sources in humanities research. From images, we can create new data about map content. Libraries can make their collections more accessible, and historians can discover new spatial patterns. But how, exactly, does this work? What are the advantages and consequences of thinking about digitized maps “as data”? Why does using open-source AI matter, and how can we trust the results? Using the inner workings of the MapReader software library as a case study, this talk analyzes the road travelled thus far in computational map studies in comparison with other historical media, like newspapers, photographs, paintings, and books. The talk concludes by proposing a framework for humanities-driven analysis of maps at scale.

Katherine McDonough is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Lancaster University. She is a historian of eighteenth-century France completing a book on the history of forced labor and infrastructure in the decades before the French Revolution. She is also a specialist in the spatial digital humanities, working with map, book, and newspaper data for early modern and modern France and Britain. Since moving to the UK in 2019, she co-founded the MapReader software library which is now being used by researchers around the world.

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