The so-called “Prize Papers” represent a unique historical collection of documents and artefacts from ships captured by the British during the early modern period (Bevan/Cock 2018). Housed at The National Archives, UK, this extensive collection is being catalogued and digitised by the Prize Papers Project (www.prizepapers.de). A special feature of this collection is that among the records, the contents of entire mailbags have survived containing hundreds of letters. In some cases, even the corresponding jute sacks have been preserved. These collections serve as time capsules, allowing for the reconstruction of a concrete snapshot of a particular moment in history and in the lives of the writers (Haasis/Freist 2023).

This presentation will focus on letters written by prisoners who were given the opportunity to write home while on shore leave. I will show initial insights into the process of analysing letters using digital methods. What moved these writers? What was the content of the letters? What emotions are evoked? How did their social backgrounds shape their letters?

The analysis of the letters will employ a mixed-methods approach (Schneider et al 2023). In this presentation, I will concentrate on analysing the letters using the method of topic modeling, highlighting the challenges and possibilities of this technique when applied to historical letter collections (McCallum 2002, Hodel/Möbus/Serif 2022). Especially with regard to the pre-processing of the letter transcriptions, letter collections present an analytical challenge, as the letters were written by many different hands and writers, some of whom are highly literate, while others simply wrote phonetically. How can these diverse letters be standardised and thus rendered usable as a coherent sample (Bayerschmidt et al. 2025)? Furthermore, the writers come from different social backgrounds, which cannot be sufficiently captured by this method alone. The presentation will, therefore, examine how the quantitative analysis of the letters can be extended through qualitative close reading, thereby incorporating the historical context of the correspondence (Rahimi et al. 2023). Finally, it will address the overarching question of whether topic modeling produces findings that go beyond the anticipated themes one would expect to find in letters from captivity - such as reference to health, longing for the recipients or accounts of captivity experiences - in order to demonstrate the added value of the method in comparison to classical hermeneutic approaches.

After three years of development version 1.0 of the Icelandic Historical Farm- and People Registry has been made accessible to the public. The registry is a research infrastructure combining data from 16 Icelandic censuses from 1703 to 1920, two mid 19th century farm surveys and two farm registries published by the Postal Service in 1885 and 1915.

The new registry has converted the source data from individual lists to networks of nodes – farms and people – making it easier to explore e.g. population and population change in individual areas, and get an overview of lifespans of Icelanders through the lens of the censuses.

A large part of the development process has revolved around cleaning and normalizing the source data, and in some instances translating it. The alignment had to be done on multiple levels as districts, counties and parishes changed in various ways throughout the period, and had to be aligned both spatially and temporally. This has called for repeated combing through the data set to seek out and rectify misalignments and other errors.

Even though the data has been deemed ready to show and allow access to it, the project is not done, and the data still has multiple errors and uncertainties, many of whom we will never be able to fix. That has proven to be another large task within the project: coming to grips with the fact that data can be considered “ready” even though it has not been fully cleaned and aligned – it's not done but it's ready.

This paper discusses the development process, the data sets involved and their state, and describes the registry's data modeling – arrived at through trials and errors – with emphasis on how the modeling lends it to external usage through API in a new project now under way, employing the farm registry as a backbone and a unified access point to various independant and often disparate databases of the Icelandic National Registry, containing information on, or connected to, farms.

Virtual Reality (VR), often perceived as a contemporary technological innovation, is deeply rooted in Western traditions of illusion, immersion, and perceptual manipulation. While recent empirical studies highlight a 230.18% surge in patent citations related to VR between 2005 and 2020, underscoring its growing significance as a critical area of interdisciplinary inquiry, this paper argues that VR is not a novel phenomenon but rather the latest iteration of a centuries-long pursuit of simulated realities. Drawing on the work of Grau (2004), Friedberg (2006), Berkman (2024) and others, this study traces the conceptual and aesthetic foundations of VR back to historical practices of illusion and representation, from the frescoes of Pompeii and Renaissance linear perspective to 17th-century peepshows, 19th-century panoramas and 20th-century cinema.

Central to this exploration is the idea that VR operates through three interconnected dimensions: the virtual, illusion, and immersion. Grau (2004) defines VR as a space of possibilities (or impossibilities) created through stimuli that deceive perception, while Friedberg (2006) emphasizes the virtual as an immaterial substitute for the material, rooted in the Platonic dialectic of image and reality. Berkman (2024) suggests that historical artefacts contributing to virtual reality often prioritize immersion through vision. This paper challenges the notion of VR as a technological breakthrough, positioning it instead as a continuation of humanity’s enduring drive to simulate and reinterpret reality. By examining key historical moments—such as the proto-perspective in the Villa dei Misteri frescoes (Fig. 1) and the development of linear perspective during the Renaissance (Fig. 2)—this study reveals how ancient illusion strategies inform contemporary digital experiences.

Utilizing digital humanities methodologies, this research reinterprets historical artefacts and techniques to uncover the perceptual and aesthetic principles underlying VR. It argues that VR’s immersive potential is not confined to digital media but is a fundamental aspect of human perception and representation. By situating VR within a broader historical and cultural framework, this paper not only enriches our understanding of its origins but also critiques the contemporary elevation of VR as a simulacrum in Baudrillard’s (2008) sense, rather contemplates virtual and reality as twin manifestations of the same principle. Ultimately, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of VR as both a technological and cultural phenomenon, bridging the gap between historical practices of illusion and modern digital environments.

This paper elaborates on an ongoing project that seeks to reconstruct the lived experience of the Rum¹ Orthodox community in 19^th-century Constantinople, a community that is now minoritized and whose members have largely if not entirely disappeared from the city’s contemporary urban landscape. The project collates various archival records, consisting of church, school, and cemetery registers, and transcribes their contents as research materials.

These records are systematic registers that document names, dates, and addresses, information that would otherwise be inaccessible from official sources and yet is crucially important for urban history. This presentation reflects on a specific case of spatial contextualization of data extracted from these records using GIS.

The contextualization is particularly challenging because of the toponymic manipulation that occurred in Istanbul in 1927 when a program was initiated to change street names due to their etymological or honorific references to the city’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious imperial past, a process that aligned with the region’s transition to a nation-state in the early 1920s. This is exactly why contemporary spatial information retrieval systems cannot locate historical addresses composed of former street names.

To overcome this challenge, this project devises a mapping approach that georeferences the early twentieth-century fire insurance atlases commissioned by the Syndicate of Fire Insurance Companies Operating in Constantinople, which was established in 1890 by foreign insurance companies that had become increasingly active following the Great Fire of Pera in 1870. Produced during the city’s occupation by the Allies after the Great War by Charles Edward Goad and Jacques Pervititch, these maps meticulously documented toponyms at various scales, including district names, street names, and numbers, and when applicable, building names, thereby facilitating the geocoding of historical addresses with high precision.

Hence, geocoding enables the reconstruction of the routes and networks that once defined the social life of the community within the urban texture of the city. This approach moves beyond static representations of space to foreground lived spatial experiences, tracing patterns of movement, congregation, and appropriation. The findings challenge prevailing historiographical narratives that equate minority presence with numerical representation or fixed territorial claims. Instead, they highlight how spatial appropriation operates beyond conventional markers of ethnicity and spatial ownership.

1. Örs explains, “they are often referred to as Constantinopolitan Greeks in English, as Konstantinoupolites or Polites in Greek, and as İstanbullu Rum in Turkish;” Ilay Romain Örs, Diaspora of the City: Stories of Cosmopolitanism from Istanbul and Athens (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3.