KBR-ULB-UGent Digital Heritage Seminar: Piraye Hacigüzeller

The KBR-ULB-UGent Digital Heritage Seminar: Digital Humanities Research 2020-2021, Part II. is a scholarly series on digital cultural heritage. This series is co-organized by KBR’s two labs: Camille (Center for Archives on the Media and Information) and the Digital Research Lab, in cooperation with Université libre de Bruxelles and Ghent University. In the second part of this series from May to June in 2021 we will virtually host three academic scholars in presenting their work on cultural heritage materials, digital methods and digital humanities. Dealing with a variety of topics, periods and methods, these talks will be held on MSTeams in English, with questions in French, Dutch or English. The target audience is scholars, but the general public is warmly welcome. Registration is required.

The first talk will be held on Monday 26 April (13:30 – 15:00) on Participatory Mapping for Heritage: Theories, Methods and Tools, given by Piraye Hacigüzeller, Assistant Professor of Digital Heritage, University of Antwerp.

ABSTRACT: The proliferation of (open) digital geospatial data sets since the 1990s and the simultaneous maturation of tools to display, manage and analyze such data have led to a certain “democratization” of cartographic practices in many disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. This trend was further reinforced by the “maps and power critique”, especially prominent in the 1990s and 2000s in human geography, where the history of Western mapping was critically approached as an instrumental practice in promoting the agendas of powerful individuals, institutions and states.

Further supported by a multidisciplinary “participatory turn” over the past decade, the so-called democratization of cartography has sparked an explosion of interest in participatory mapping in many social sciences and humanities disciplines as well as related interdisciplinary fields such as heritage studies. In this lecture I will provide an overview of theories, methods and tools relevant to participatory mapping projects within heritage studies.