Maps Are Too Exciting!
In association with Bodleian Libraries and the ARCHIOx project
Maps Are Too Exciting!
- DIGITAL INNOVATIONS IN MAPPING -
About the Symposium
As our physical and digital worlds converge, evolving technologies are transforming how space and geography are represented, shaping new forms of consciousness and knowledge.
Digital recording and display technologies provide enhanced documentation and research for rare maps, globes, and other cartographic material. The same GIS being used to map our planet are mapping the surface of vellum manuscripts, and projected digital images. Such new material evidence, combined with machine learning and immersive display technologies, can cultivate a new intimacy with the physical world.
This inaugural Sunderland Collection Symposium brought together experts in cultural heritage and technology, in a celebration and exploration of the role that maps play, and the latest innovations in mapping.
Below, you can browse the talks and panel discussions, meet the speakers, and find out more about the Bodleian Libraries and ARCHIOx.
Programme
Morning Panel and Q&A: The art of cartography and new evidence
Chair: Judith Siefring, Head of Digital Collections Discovery, Bodleian Libraries
- John Barrett
- Nick Millea
- Yossef Rapoport
- Sanne Frequin
Thinking Bigger Case Study
Bruce Mau - Nesting Globes: visualising the current global situation
Afternoon Panel and Q&A - Mapping in a digital world
Chair: Giovanni Pala, economic historian of technology and information
- Katie McDonough
- Sarah Kenderdine
- Ed Parsons
Material evidence of the surface of objects
John Barrett
Senior Photographer, Bodleian Libraries and Lead Photographer, ARCHIOx
Spectacular! A digital exploration of the Gough Map
Nick Millea
Map Curator, the Bodleian Libraries
The Greatest Medieval Map-Maker: Al-Idrisi and Roger’s Silver Disc
Yossef Rapoport
Prof. of Islamic History, Queen Marys University London
A Ship’s Globe in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht
Dr. Sanne Frequin
Assistant Prof. of Humanities, University of Utrecht
Morning Panel Discussion
featuring John Barrett, Nick Millea, Yossef Rapoport, and Sanne Frenquin
moderated by Judith Siefring
Nesting Globes: visualising the current global situation
Bruce Mau
CEO, Massive Change Network
Map Search: using AI to explore map content
Dr. Katherine McDonough
Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Lancaster University and Senior Research Fellow, The Alan Turing Institute
Deep Mapping: from archives to the universe
Sarah Kenderdine
Professor of Digital Humanities, École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Head of the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), Lausanne
“Is that the world in your pocket?”
Ed Parsons
Geospatial Technologist, Google
Afternoon Panel Discussion
featuring Sarah Kenderdine, Katie McDonough, and Ed Parsons
moderated by Giovanni Pala
Meet the Speakers
John Barrett is Senior Photographer for the Bodleian Libraries. Since 2005, John has provided recordings of Bodleian originals for numerous publications. His work involves the development of new methods of recording special collections material.
John is technical lead at the Bodleian for ARCHIOx (Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Oxford), and the first person to use the Selene Photometric Stereo System within a major library. He has recorded the surface of a wide range of objects, in each case revealing the importance of their materiality beyond the reach of the naked eye, thereby also facilitating new scholarship.
Nick Millea is Map Curator at the Bodleian Libraries, an Honorary Fellow and 'Bartholomew Globe' winner at the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and Chair of the British and Irish Committee for Map Information and Cataloguing Systems. He is also a founding member of The Oxford Seminars in Cartography.
Nick has published extensively on maps, including 50 Maps and the Stories They Tell (co-authored with Jerry Brotton). He has curated several exhibitions at the Bodleian - most recently Talking Maps.
He has spent many years researching and writing on the medieval Gough Map, including The Gough Map: the earliest road map of Great Britain?, and acting as Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Understanding the medieval Gough Map through physics, chemistry and history.
Yossef Rapoport is Professor of Islamic history at Queen Mary University London. He researches medieval Islamic maps, focusing on Arabic maps from the middle Islamic period (1000-1500). He was part of the Oxford-based Medieval Islamic Views of the Cosmos project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and led by Professor Emilie Savage-Smith.
Yossef consequently published An Eleventh-Century Guide to the Cosmos and Lost Maps of the Caliphs (both with Emilie Savage-Smith). His survey of Islamic cartography, published as Islamic Maps, includes a chapter on the maps of Al-Idrīsī and their unique place in the history of medieval map-making.
Sanne Frequin is an art historian specialising in digital art history. Her research focuses on the digital reconstruction of lost or damaged artefacts and on the use of digitized artefacts for research and education, particularly for early modern art.
Currently, Sanne is working on the digital and 3D reconstruction of the panel painting of the Lindau Master, and on the serious game Medieval Me - where high school students are introduced to interdisciplinary collaboration.
Sanne is the academic coordinator of the Masters in Art History at the University of Utrecht, where she is an Assistant Professor. She is a board member of the Utrecht University Teaching Academy and contributes to the Digital ArtLab.
Judith Siefring is Head of Digital Collections Discovery at the Bodleian Libraries. She manages a programme of digital library projects and services to enable research and teaching, with a particular focus on making special collections content discoverable online.
Resources developed and managed within Bodleian Digital Collections Discovery include Digital Bodleian and Manuscripts and Archives at Oxford University.
Bruce Mau is co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network, a holistic design collective based in Chicago; founder of Bruce Mau Studio; and Innovator in Residence at Freeman Company, the global leader in event services.
Across his 30-year career in design innovation, Bruce has collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. He became an international figure with the publication of his landmark book S,M,L,XL, designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas. Bruce is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for whole-system transformation.
Katherine McDonough is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Lancaster University and Senior Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London. She specialises in eighteenth-century France, but has been embedded in nineteenth-century British history for the last 5 years on the Living with Machines project at the Turing. With those colleagues, she co-developed the prize-winning MapReader software for analyzing large collections of historical maps.
Katie was the UK PI on Machines Reading Maps, a recently-completed project that creates and analyses text on map data.
Sarah Kenderdine researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. She is a professor of digital humanities at the École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, leads the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), and is curator-at-large of EPFL Pavilions.
Sarah is a world authority on interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Here upcoming book is Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology (Routledge).
Ed Parsons is Google’s Geospatial Technologist, with responsibility for evangelising Google’s mission to organise the world’s information using geography. Ed also leads Google’s efforts in maintaining a healthy Open Data Ecosystem in Europe.
He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium and was co-chair of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group. He also represents Google at the EMTEL committee of ETSI, developing geospatial solutions for emergency telecommunications.
Ed is a Visiting Professor at University College London and has been an industry advisor to a number of international universities. Earlier this year, Ed was awarded the inaugural “Professional Geography Award” by the Royal Geographical Society.
Giovanni Pala is an economic historian specializing in the history of technology and information. He is a keen explorer of the different applications of computer vision and visual analysis tools to historical research and collections. He is strongly committed to changing how we interact and think about sources and artefacts: by unlocking new ways of visualizing and reading 2D and 3D materials, their shape or patterns, to expand how collections are interrogated.
Giovanni’s research on the evolution of map-making in early modern Europe is an example of how new technologies can help tackle historical questions. His doctoral project explores these themes in the context of historical cartography during the important years of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. His work examines maps as an information good with a technological dimension, studying the development and accuracy of coastline representation in time.
ARCHiOx (Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Oxford) is a research and development partnership between the Factum Foundation, the Bodleian Libraries and the University of Oxford. It was launched in February 2022 and is directly linked to the ARCHiVe structure established at Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, with generous support from The Helen Hamlyn Trust.
Bodleian Libraries is the library service supporting the University of Oxford. Its mission is to support the learning, teaching and research objectives of the University; and to develop and maintain access to Oxford's unique collections for the benefit of scholarship and society.
Libraries in the group include the Bodleian Library itself - founded in 1606 - alongside 25 other libraries across Oxford. Together, the Libraries hold more than 13 million printed items, over 80,000 e-journals and outstanding special collections including rare books and manuscripts, classical papyri, maps, music, art and printed ephemera.
Bodleian Libraries are also a key part of Oxford’s cultural community and leads an exciting programme of public exhibitions and events to engage communities with collections.
