Seminar: New Approaches to Historical Spatial Data
Event details
| Date | 29.08.2025 |
| Hour | 14:00 › 16:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Leif Isaksen is Professor of Ancient History and Digital Humanities in the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion and Theology at the University of Exeter. His main interests are in spatial and temporal representation in the humanities - both in the ancient world and the modern one - and the use of Intelligent Systems to relate and interrogate online resources about the past. This is most notably as Director of several projects associated with the Pelagios Network, including the development of the Recogito annotation platform. He has a background in archaeology, and directed the Cluny Hill Dig. He is also engaged with development of digital skills in the Arts and Humanities, specifically through the Hot Source! and DISKAH projects. Leif has been involved as an Officer, Trustee or Steering Group member of various Humanities scholarly organisations worldwide, including Computer Applications in Archaeology, the European Association for the Digital humanities, and the International Society for the History of the Map, and was Executive Board Chair of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO) from 2019 to 2021. Dr. Stefan Leyk is a Professor of Geography and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. He served as the Director of the CU Boulder Population Center and is the Interim Director of the Population Program at the Institute of Behavioral Science. He is a Geographical Information Scientist specializing in uncertainty analysis, demographic small area estimation and spatio-temporal modeling, with extensive collaborative research in spatial epidemiology, spatial demography and coupled socio-environmental systems. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the European Commission, The Fogarty International Center, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Current research efforts include the analysis of multi-scale mortality and morbidity patterns, demographic small area estimation techniques such as dasymetric modeling as well as the production and analysis of historical settlement data in the study of urban change, and the vulnerability and exposure of the built environment to natural hazards such as sea level rise or wildfire. This research is of methodological and applied nature offering analytical innovations to improve substantive research efforts in interdisciplinary settings and our understanding of the interactions between social and environmental systems. |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Introduction
This seminar brings together two leading scholars exploring innovative ways of representing historical geographies.
Leif Isaksen will show how geovisualization opens new perspectives on pre-Modern geographic documents, from the Ravenna Cosmography to Islamic cosmology.
Stefan Leyk will present large-scale historical settlement datasets that reveal over a century of urban transformation and exposure to natural hazards.
Together, these talks highlight how digital methods reshape our understanding of space, time, and human experience across centuries.
Content
Leif Isaksen - Geovisualizing ancient geographic documents
This talk will explore the idea of geovisualization – as distinct from standard GIS or digital mapping – as a means for interpreting and comparing pre-Modern geographic documents. It will present two current works-in-progress as case studies. The first is development of an online platform to explore the relationship between the Ravenna Cosmography, an eighth century written description of the world, with the content of the Peutinger Map, a Medieval copy of a Roman world map which appears to have served as one of the Cosmography’s primary sources. The second examines an apparent shift in cosmological perspective as Greek geographic sources were absorbed into Abbasid scholarship in the ninth century. Interactive models are used to demonstrate how a seemingly subjective change in world view may have in turn have led to unexpected practical consequences for Islamic geography.
Stefan Leyk - Mapping and analyzing the built environment over long time periods: Contributions to Urban Science and Natural Hazards Analysis
The collection, processing, and analysis of remote sensing data since the early 1970s has rapidly improved our understanding of change on the Earth's surface. While satellite-based Earth observation has proven to be of vast scientific value, these data are typically confined to recent decades of observation and often lack important thematic detail. This talk summarizes recent efforts on the advancement in this arena and describes the construction and evaluation of new spatially explicit settlement data for the United States and Spain that are consistently enumerated at fine spatial and temporal granularity and extend over a period of more than 120 years. These unique data layers are created through extensive data integration and scraping processes using input sources such as building-stock, real estate as well as building footprint data and enable us to extract different key attributes as series of gridded geospatial datasets. These datasets are parts of the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the United States (HISDAC-US) and Spain (HISDAC-ES). This talk will also showcase early applications of these datasets in analyzing urban change over long time periods and assessing the trends of exposure of the built environment to natural hazards such as wildfire and sea level rise. It will conclude with outlooks on ongoing research related to the creation of historical population data through spatial re-allocation techniques and first attempts to project future distributions of the built environment and populations.
This seminar brings together two leading scholars exploring innovative ways of representing historical geographies.
Leif Isaksen will show how geovisualization opens new perspectives on pre-Modern geographic documents, from the Ravenna Cosmography to Islamic cosmology.
Stefan Leyk will present large-scale historical settlement datasets that reveal over a century of urban transformation and exposure to natural hazards.
Together, these talks highlight how digital methods reshape our understanding of space, time, and human experience across centuries.
Content
Leif Isaksen - Geovisualizing ancient geographic documents
This talk will explore the idea of geovisualization – as distinct from standard GIS or digital mapping – as a means for interpreting and comparing pre-Modern geographic documents. It will present two current works-in-progress as case studies. The first is development of an online platform to explore the relationship between the Ravenna Cosmography, an eighth century written description of the world, with the content of the Peutinger Map, a Medieval copy of a Roman world map which appears to have served as one of the Cosmography’s primary sources. The second examines an apparent shift in cosmological perspective as Greek geographic sources were absorbed into Abbasid scholarship in the ninth century. Interactive models are used to demonstrate how a seemingly subjective change in world view may have in turn have led to unexpected practical consequences for Islamic geography.
Stefan Leyk - Mapping and analyzing the built environment over long time periods: Contributions to Urban Science and Natural Hazards Analysis
The collection, processing, and analysis of remote sensing data since the early 1970s has rapidly improved our understanding of change on the Earth's surface. While satellite-based Earth observation has proven to be of vast scientific value, these data are typically confined to recent decades of observation and often lack important thematic detail. This talk summarizes recent efforts on the advancement in this arena and describes the construction and evaluation of new spatially explicit settlement data for the United States and Spain that are consistently enumerated at fine spatial and temporal granularity and extend over a period of more than 120 years. These unique data layers are created through extensive data integration and scraping processes using input sources such as building-stock, real estate as well as building footprint data and enable us to extract different key attributes as series of gridded geospatial datasets. These datasets are parts of the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the United States (HISDAC-US) and Spain (HISDAC-ES). This talk will also showcase early applications of these datasets in analyzing urban change over long time periods and assessing the trends of exposure of the built environment to natural hazards such as wildfire and sea level rise. It will conclude with outlooks on ongoing research related to the creation of historical population data through spatial re-allocation techniques and first attempts to project future distributions of the built environment and populations.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- College of Humanities Frédéric Kaplan and Isabella di Lenardo