Environmental Digital Humanities Seminar

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.

Organisers: Giulia Grisot (Manchester), Katherine McDonough (Lancaster), Luca Scholz (Manchester), Joanna Taylor (Manchester).

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

Sign up for our events on Eventbrite.

13 November 2024, 12-1 pm (online). Dr Anne Alexander (University of Cambridge): AI and Mapping as Interpretative Devices for Investigative Journalists

The speaker will present an overview of the remote-sensing investigations methodology developed by Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) in collaboration with Watershed Investigations and the Pulitzer Centre's Rainforest Investigations Network during a Data Lab in June 2024 and the Cambridge Social Data School in September 2024.

Bringing together on-the-ground reporting using qualitative methods, in dialogue with leads generated by AI analysis of satellite images, Dr Alexander will discuss examples of the methodology in action using a case study of intensive farming and algal blooms in Lough Neagh, Northern Ireland's largest lake.

29 January 2025 (in person). Environmental Digital Humanities Workshop at the University of Manchester

• 11-11.15am: Introduction
• 11.15am-12.15pm: Session 1
  • Jonny Huck (University of Manchester) - Embracing Uncertainty in the Environmental Digital Humanities
  • Kirsty Lilley (Lancaster University), David Alexander (Peak District National Park) - Landscape Change and Conservation with MapReader
• 12.15-1.15pm: Lunch break
• 1.15-2.15pm: Session 2
  • Katie McDonough (Lancaster University), Daniel Wilson (The Alan Turing Institute), Rosie Wood (The Alan Turing Institute) - Introduction to MapReader
• 2.15-2.45pm: Coffee break
• 2.45-4.15pm: Session 3
  • Jo Walton (University of Sussex) - DH Climate Coalition
  • Paul Heinicker (University of Potsdam) - Planetary Diagramming. On Scaling in Climate Images
  • Marco Panato (University of Nottingham) - Integrating historical sources, spatial analysis and archaeology: Pisa and its territory in the early Middle Ages (ca. 600-1099)
• 4.15-4.30pm: Concluding remarks
• 4.30-5pm: Environmental DH Methods Clinic

12 March 2025, 3-4pm (online). Dr Wright Kennedy (University of South Carolina): Separate but Dead: Disease & Segregation in New Orleans, 1880-1915

This presentation documents the immediate health impacts of residential segregation and environmental transformations on communities of colour in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. Utilising a historical GIS framework, which integrates diverse datasets—including death certificates, property tax records, weather logs, city directories, fire records, and topographic surveys—this study analyses the intersection of race, environment, and health outcomes. Through this lens, it reveals a deliberate grassroots movement by white residents to segregate neighbourhoods, which systematically displaced communities of colour from areas of higher, drier land in the early 1900s.

While public health advancements and landscape transformation projects ostensibly aimed at improving urban life, the benefits were unequally distributed, amplifying environmental health disparities and reinforcing localised cycles of poverty that persist today. This research posits that white residents actively established not only a racially-based system of segregation but an entrenched framework of environmental and public health inequities, with profound and lasting impacts on community resilience, neighbourhood development, and generational health outcomes in New Orleans.

By re-examining the spatial and social implications of segregation, this talk offers a critical re-interpretation of historical urban policy, highlighting the complex legacy of structural inequality at the intersection of race, disease, and the environment in the urban American South.

21 May 2025, 12-1 pm (online). Dr Catherine Porter (University of Limerick): Exploring the Weather in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland: a Case Study of the First Ordnance Survey of Ireland

Recent digitisation of major meteorological sources has offered valuable insights into Ireland's past climate; however, more localised historical weather data remain sparse for most of the country. A largely unexplored resource lies in the early nineteenth century Ordnance Survey (OS) statistical reports collected as a component of the first OS of Ireland.

This talk sets out how a team of researchers applied diverse techniques such as corpus linguistics, Geographic Information Systems, and sentiment analysis to explore the early OS weather records. Weather Journals from 15 parish “memoirs” across seven northern counties were extracted from the text, providing both qualitative observations and quantitative temperature and pressure data. The readings were analysed and visualised, and a sentiment analysis completed on the qualitative weather observations using a bespoke sentiment dictionary.

These records offer unique applications, including local weather insights from the early nineteenth century, showcasing the possibilities of using a combination of data types and approaches in the study of historic weather. They also shed light on the experiences and methods of OS staff, contributing to a deeper understanding of Ireland's meteorological, environmental and survey history.

15 October 2025, 12-1pm (online). Dr Iason Jongepier (University of Antwerp) and Vincent Ducatteeuw (Ghent University): Artemis - Advanced Research Tools for Environmental Studies for Historical Maps of the Scheldt Valley

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.

12 November 2025, 12-1pm (online): Elizabeth Hameeteman (TU Berlin): Reimagining Desalination through Digital Archives

During my Gale-ESEH Non-Residential Fellowship in Digital Environmental History, I explored how digital tools can expand archival research on the history of desalination. Until then, my work relied mostly on traditional archival practices: following paper trails, taking notes by hand, and reconstructing stories from scattered documents. The fellowship invited me to try a different approach.

Using Gale’s collections and the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, I examined how desalination was promoted as a postwar development strategy across colonial and postcolonial contexts. Rather than working within a single archive, I could move across newspapers, government publications, and institutional reports from multiple regions and languages. Tools such as ngram analysis, entity recognition, and topic modeling highlighted recurring terms like “development” and “modernization,” while also drawing my attention to silences — moments when desalination might have been expected but was absent from the record.

The project’s initial scope was intentionally broad, designed to see what themes and connections might emerge: tracing how colonial powers promoted desalination in overseas territories and how newly independent states later adopted it as part of their strategies for sovereignty and growth. At stake were questions about politics and technological choice: why governments invested in desalination, what promises it carried, and how these visions circulated in the postwar world. Yet what proved most transformative was not the data itself but what surfaced between the lines.

Among the documents I encountered — though not directly tied to my original case study — was a 1959 White House memo on a desalination project in Tunisia. I knew the project, but the memo revealed US involvement was deeper that I had thought. It prompted me to reflect on the political logics of desalination in newly independent states and, more significantly, led me to a broader realization: solar desalination — a once-promising but ultimately sidelined technology — remains critically underexplored.

What began broadly became a launching point for a more focused trajectory on this history. This new direction emerged from the fellowship’s space for reflection, highlighting how digital methods can not only reveal new sources but also open pathways to rethink overlooked futures.