Conference Agenda

Historical maps are increasingly accessed, interpreted, and reused through open digital infrastructures that support collaborative georeferencing, annotation, and spatial analysis. Over the past decade, standards such as IIIF have fundamentally altered how historical cartography circulates across institutions, research communities, and public audiences. Rather than functioning solely as static visual artefacts, digitized maps are increasingly treated as data: interoperable, reusable, and open to collective interpretation and computational analysis.

This panel examines how collaborative cartographic infrastructures reshape research workflows, public participation, and the stewardship of historical geographic knowledge within the spatial humanities. Bringing together historians, infrastructure builders, and humanities software developers, the panel foregrounds the interplay between platforms, standards, and user communities rather than focusing on a single tool. It explores how cartographic infrastructures enable new forms of participatory scholarship, cross-temporal landscape research, and environmental-historical inquiry, while also reflecting on the challenges of sustainability, interoperability, and community maintenance.

Using 19th century Lisbon cartography before interoperability: challenges from a near past, looking at the near future

The panel opens with a historical and methodological reflection by Daniel Alves, who revisits the challenges of working with nineteenth-century urban cartography before the widespread availability of interoperable digital infrastructures. Drawing on research experiences with Lisbon’s nineteenth-century maps, this contribution highlights the fragmented, labor-intensive workflows that characterized earlier digital cartographic research: limited digitization, local-only access, bespoke georeferencing processes, and duplicated efforts across projects. By contrasting this “near past” with today’s infrastructure-rich environment, the paper offers a critical lens on what contemporary platforms have already achieved, while also identifying what remains to be done to fully align historical cartographic research with FAIR principles and sustainable data practices.

Using Allmaps to turn text and feature annotations on digitized maps into geospatial datasets and visualizations.

A second contribution, by Bert Spaan, Jules Schoonman, and Manuel Claeys Bouuaert, presents Allmaps as an open-source ecosystem for curating, georeferencing, and exploring IIIF-enabled maps. While Allmaps is widely known for its user-facing web applications that support collaborative georeferencing, this paper focuses on its less visible but crucial role as a data transformation infrastructure. The authors demonstrate how text and feature annotations on digitized maps (whether generated by OCR, computer vision and AI models, or manual annotation) can be transformed into geospatial datasets and visualizations. By projecting annotated content from pixel coordinates to geographic space, Allmaps enables spatial analysis workflows that remain closely connected to the original map artefacts. This contribution illustrates how lowering technical barriers can support engaged scholarship, collaborative annotation projects, and the transformation of map collections into queryable geospatial resources.

Opening digitized map collections as data with MapReader

The panel then turns to humanities research software with a contribution by Katherine McDonough, who introduces MapReader, an open-source library designed to enable large-scale computational analysis of digitized map collections. MapReader supports image classification and text spotting, allowing scholars to work with the multimodal nature of historical maps in ways that move beyond traditional GIS paradigms. Positioned within a broader “open maps” ecosystem, including IIIF discovery tools, annotation platforms, and Allmaps georeferencing, this paper discusses ongoing efforts to build bridges between research software and digital research infrastructures. Attention is given to collaboration with map-collecting institutions, community-driven development, and the practical challenges of sustaining humanities research software over time.

Mapathons – plotting history through collaborative georeferencing.

The final contribution, from Fien Danniau and Rein Debrulle focuses on mapathons as participatory cartographic practices. In digital humanities, mapathons emerge as participatory events where volunteers collaboratively engage with historical maps. This paper defines mapathons as collaborative georeferencing events, that not only plot geographical and historical data, but also emphasize on the narrative essence of a map and create a context where citizens can share their stories and questions about the past with researchers. We explored the potential of mapathons for geospatial research, heritage work and historical thinking through two different mapathon events in 2025 (‘Mapathon 1571’ and ‘Schelde-Mapathon’). Mapping tool Allmaps proved to be a game changer for the mapathon as a social practice.

Taken together, these contributions demonstrate how collaborative cartographic infrastructures support new forms of evidence-building, public engagement, and societal relevance in the spatial humanities. By juxtaposing historical experience, infrastructural development, research software, and participatory practice, the panel offers a critical and forward-looking assessment of how digital cartography is reshaping relationships between maps, data, institutions, and communities.

Chair: Christophe Verbruggen