The arrival of low-cost, high-affordance digital tools for online mapping brings both opportunities and challenges for historians in discovering and communicating the past to different audiences. This short paper showcases a range of approaches to these questions and issues identified by researchers involved with the Time Layered Cultural map (TLCMap) project and research involving cultural mapping and digital techniques.

Creative data visualisation via online mapping is a powerful way to reveal historical patterns such as armed frontier conflicts, the journeys of mobile actors and flows of information in the past, legal prosecutions of mobile people, or the use of urban spaces. Online maps offer intuitive and visually accessible ways to present and promote findings. They allow users and audiences to interact with and explore a wide and deep set of linked information in ways not possible in print.

On the other hand, maps also present some challenges. Timeline maps, for instance, require precision about location and date, a precision which often conflicts with the complexity and uncertainty of historical materials. Questions of scale (generality versus particularity) and of the inevitable partiality of the data abound.

The contribution of TLCMap has been that it brings scholars and technicians together in an integrated and longitudinal way to investigate DH for historians and others. TLCMap has put into practice what we have learned over the past two decades in DH and more widely, working within the limits of the technology but demonstrating and democratising the effort.

In the archival practices of the Queer Indonesia Archive (QIA), the team regularly engages with diverse forms of materiality—its affective resonance as well as the political dimensions embedded within it. As a queer archive operating primarily in digital spaces, with in-person activities such as exhibitions, QIA pays particular attention to the material qualities of archival items as a way to guide the reproduction of digital records into physical formats. This process acknowledges that reproduced materials are inevitably subject to omission—they cannot fully capture the texture, feeling, or embodied presence of the original. At the same time, metadata on materiality offers insight into the relationship between individuals and their memories—how items were acquired, produced, stored, what it means to preserve them and their queer subjectivities. This paper explores materiality metadata as both a technical guide for reproduction and a narrative layer within the archive: what should be recorded, what guiding questions can inform collection and digitization, and what kinds of contextual notes should accompany both digital and physical reproductions.

This study highlights the urgent need for inclusive research practices in environmental survey studies, particularly regarding marginalized communities. Adequate data collection on climate change perceptions among these communities is becoming crucial for researchers. However, this can be a difficult task as survey items containing overcomplex or abstract information may cause comprehension challenges. Prior studies indicate that marginalized populations are at greater risk of having lower literacy levels and, subsequently, of facing comprehension challenges. Therefore, the current study investigates whether these individuals experience comprehension issues when interpreting environmental survey items created by the Dutch government (1), what type of issues they experience (2), and whether there is a difference in responses to a modified version of the questionnaire, as compared to the original questionnaire (3). Through cognitive interviewing (N = 12), we have identified four primary categories of comprehension issues: semantic meaning problems, pragmatic meaning problems, vague response options, and complex phrasing. Subsequently, by conducting a two-condition experiment (N = 60), we tested whether modifications such as additional information and context affected comprehensibility of survey items and whether this led to different answers in condition 1 (original survey) vs. condition 2 (modified survey). The outcomes show that (1) participants indeed face comprehension issues, (2) modifying information leads to enhanced comprehensibility of survey items, and (3) modifying information leads to more environmentally responsible (i.e., increased concern) responses. Our results highlight critical implications for researchers and policymakers seeking to engage marginalized populations in environmental communication and survey research, emphasizing the importance of accessible information in addressing climate-related issues.

Speculative fiction is rife with fraught representations of technology. From its early history, the genre has either taken a techno-pessimistic form about the ethical consequences and sheer hubris of technological innovation, or valorised techno-optimist futurities in which novel technologies absolve us of responsibility to land and to each other. In this presentation, I raise a throughline in my thesis-in-progress about diasporic and Indigenous visions of futurity, regarding the portrayal of digital media and virtual archives in relation to cultural maintenance.

I examine the entangled nature of cultural stewardship in relation to digital technologies within three recent speculative (and speculative adjacent) texts, Waanyi writer Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (2022), Grace Chan’s Every Version of You (2023), and Goori writer Mykaela Saunders’ Always Will Be (2024). I explore how these texts stage encounters between embodied cultural heritage and digital forms of data, raising questions about how such technologies recruit, rewrite, or erase cultural knowledges. I look at how digital networks in Praiseworthy clash with networks of embodied knowledge, where digital media facilitates settler-colonial imposition of narratives and cartographies upon Country. In Chan’s portrayal of diasporic connection to place, I look at the situatedness of memory and belonging, suggesting that culture may not so easily traverse the boundary between virtual and “meatspace”. I conclude by raising Saunders’ portrayals of a culture-centred recruitment of technology, where culture is not subservient to technology, and recontextualises technological encounter within the SF genre altogether. Drawing from the digital humanities, Indigenous studies and literary studies, this paper explores how speculative fiction re-imagines our relationship with digital systems and asks: what cultural knowledge do these technologies facilitate or foreclose?