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.

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 Center'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 neighborhoods, which systematically displaced communities of color 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.