Special Issue: Spatial Humanities and Contemporary Geographical Approaches (Accepted Manuscripts)
Special Issue: Spatial Humanities and Contemporary Geographical Approaches

Unlocking the Research Potential of Early Modern Dutch Maps

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Leon van Wissen
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Manjusha Kuruppath
Huygens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Netherlands
Lodewijk Petram
Huygens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Netherlands
Map of Cochin, 18th century. Source: NL-HaNA, 4.VEL, inv. no. 907, http://hdl.handle.net/10648/1ee0e682-3223-4a6a-90fd-c05536198d5c.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.si.spat.hum.l.wis.12.17
Categories

Published 2024-11-19

Keywords

  • Historical Cartography,
  • Geographic Information Systems (GIS),
  • Spatial Analysis,
  • IIIF Framework,
  • Annotation,
  • Colonial History
    • ...More
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How to Cite

van Wissen, Leon, Manjusha Kuruppath, and Lodewijk Petram. 2024. “Unlocking the Research Potential of Early Modern Dutch Maps”. European Journal of Geography, November, s12-s17. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.si.spat.hum.l.wis.12.17.

Copyright (c) 2024 Leon van Wissen, Manjusha Kuruppath, Lodewijk Petram

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Received 2024-09-30
Accepted 2024-11-19
Published 2024-11-19

Abstract

Working from the GLOBALISE project, we have enhanced access to over 5,000 Dutch maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, renowned for their geographic and historical significance. We have laid the groundwork for enriching these maps with annotations and metadata following the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) standards, directly linked to their digital representations from the collection-holding institutions. This approach ensures a FAIR framework for sharing research results and fosters collaborative annotation. We enriched the maps with georeferencing annotations and employed automated tools to extract toponyms and geographic features, enabling large-scale analysis. These annotations open new pathways for exploring understudied historical regions, such as early modern Kerala, and assessing Dutch colonial influence globally. By publishing our data early, we aim to encourage further collaborative refinements, allowing a wider scholarly community to improve and build upon this work. This approach highlights the potential of combining historical cartography with computational tools to empower large-scale geographic and historical research.

Highlights:

  • Dataset of over 5,000 early modern Dutch maps, accessible for collaborative annotation.
  • Automated tools used to extract geographic features, toponyms, and cartographic symbols from maps.
  • New opportunities for large-scale analysis of early modern topographies and Dutch colonial influence.
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