Event Details

This seminar will be given by Dr Iason Jongepier (University of Antwerp) & Vincent Ducatteeuw (Ghent University). The Environmental Digital Humanities Seminar (EDHS) brings together scholars from across the humanities who use digital methods to understand environments past, present, and future.

This presentation introduces Artemis, a Flemish research project that unlocks and interlinks historical Belgian maps for environmental and landscape research. The focus is on the Scheldt River Valley between Ghent and Antwerp, a region shaped by a long history of human interaction with the river. Artemis processes a selection of pre-1880 maps, including the Ferraris, Vandermaelen and cadastral series, using a combination of computer vision techniques and manual validation. The extracted data, such as toponyms and land use, will be made available as Linked Open Data through a IIIF-enabled online platform. This creates a reusable infrastructure for researchers and institutions.

The second part of the talk highlights one of Artemis’s research scenarios: historical flooding and water management in the Scheldt basin. Using extracted map data together with sources such as newspapers and official reports, the study reconstructs changes in hydrography and identifies flood-prone areas between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on key landscape features including dikes, wetlands and floodplains, and explores how their transformation may have increased vulnerability to flooding. Special attention is given to the 1906 flood and the ways in which local communities perceived and responded to the event.

The Environmental Digital Humanities Seminar (EDHS) brings together scholars from across the humanities who use digital methods to understand environments past, present, and future. EDHS is inclusive of urban, rural, suburban spaces and places and while we explore environments globally, we also showcase local work from and about the North of England.

EDHS is supported by the Centre for Digital Humanities, Cultures, and Media at the University of Manchester, the Digital Humanities Centre at Lancaster, the N8, the Lancaster Data Science Institute, CIDRAL, and the MCGIS research group at Manchester.