Conference Agenda

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.

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 (SF) is rife with fraught representations of digital technologies. From its early history, it has posited narratives of techno-pessimistic cautionary tales of ethical quandaries and the sheer hubris of innovation, or valorised techno-optimist futures 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 futurisms, regarding the speculative ethics of digital archives in relation to cultural maintenance and wellbeing. I examine the digital-embodied dynamics in two recent works of SF, Goori and Lebanese writer Mykaela Saunders’ <em>Always Will Be</em> (2022), and Grace Chan’s <em>Every Version of You</em> (2023). I explore how these texts stage encounters at the interface of the embodied and the digital, raising questions about how digital data practices recover, facilitate, or erase cultural knowledges. I read Saunders’ portrayals of community-centred archival sovereignty, learning from her recontextualisation of archival power, before turning to Chan’s portrayal of diasporic archives falling through the cracks, where translations between the qualitative realm of culture and the quantitative world of digital data is fraught, and culture cannot so seamlessly traverse the boundary between “meatspace” and the digital virtual. This presentation explores how these speculative ethics of the archive reimagines our relationship with digital data and asks: how do these technologies facilitate or foreclose cultural knowledges?