Exploring Old Maps

Third International Workshop on Exploring Old Maps (EOM 2018)
University of Kent, October 25-26, 2018

Exploring Old Maps


Many libraries own an extensive collection of historical maps. Beside their value as historical objects, these maps are an important source of information for researchers in various scientific disciplines. This ranges from the actual history of cartography and general history to the geographic and social sciences. With the progressing digitisation of libraries and archives, these maps become more easily available to a larger public. A basic level of digitisation consists of scanned bitmap images, tagged with some basic bibliographic information such as title, author and year of production. In order to make the maps more accessible, further information describing the information content of the map is desirable. This would enable more user-friendly interfaces, relevant queries of a database, and automatic analyses.

Targeted Audience

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for the communication of results (which may appear elsewhere) that may be useful to the community. Researchers and practitioners of all areas working on unlocking the content of old maps are welcome to participate. We welcome humanities scholars, developers, computer and information scientists as well as librarians, archivists and curators. Submissions are welcome from researchers at all career stages, as well as practitioners.

Scope of Interest

Relevant topics are (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Digital media, digitisation, curation of digital objects
  • Design and application of algorithms for analysis and visualisation methods
  • Spatial analysis and applications of GIS concerning old maps
  • Crowdsourcing, user research, citizen science, and public humanities
  • Digital Libraries for old maps
  • Visualisation of old maps
  • Virtual Research Environments and Infrastructures