A History of Place in the Digital Age explores the history and impact of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related digital mapping technologies in humanities research. Providing a historical and methodological discussion of place in the most important primary materials which make up the human record, including text and artefacts, the book explains how these materials frame, form and communicate location in the age of the internet. This leads in to a discussion of how the World Wide Web distorts and skews place, amplifying some voices and reducing others.

The event will be opened and chaired by Professor Patrick Ffrench, Vice Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London. A discussion of the topic will be given by Jane Winters, Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study.

Stuart Dunn is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, UK, where he has worked since 2006. He holds a PhD in Aegean Bronze Age Archaeology from the University of Durham, UK, and has interests in the history of cartography, crowdsourcing in the humanities (with a special emphasis on Volunteered Geographic Information, or VGI), and the Spatial Humanities.

Jane Winters is Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her current and past research projects include Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data, Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities, Traces through Time: Prosopography in Practice across Big Data, the Thesaurus of British and Irish History as SKOS, and Born Digital Big Data and Methods for History and the Humanities. Her research interests include digital history, born digital data for humanities research, digital scholarly editing, and open access publishing.

Patrick Ffrench is a Professor in the Department of French and Vice Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. He is the author of five books: The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (OUP, 1996); The Cut: Reading Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'œil (British Academy 2000); After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (Legenda, 2007); Thinking Cinema with Proust (Legenda, 2018) and Roland Barthes and Film: Signs and Affects (Bloomsbury, 2019, forthcoming). His current research concerns the experiments in institutional life undertaken in the context of the movement of institutional psychotherapy in France, and, as a longer term project, forms of 'aberrant' movement in 20th-century French thought, literature and film.

Refreshments will be served afterwards. This event is free to attend, please register your interest on Eventbrite.