Profile

I am a historian of eighteenth-century France and a specialist in the spatial digital humanities. I work across multiple temporal and geographical fields as I develop new methods for analysing digitized collections of historical maps as data.

My first monograph, Public Work: Making Roads and Citizens in Eighteenth-Century France, willexamine a particularly unsuccessful socio-economic reform related to infrastructure development in pre-Revolutionary France. Public Work tells the history of the corvée, e.g. the forced labour regime used on highway construction sites ca. 1730 to 1790, as seen from the perspective of the peasants, engineers, and administrators building highways in Brittany. I argue that Breton peasants and some elites used different information technologies to contest the coercive corvée and reimagine provincial government in terms of democratic public utility, all while centralized solutions to the injustice of the corvée failed across the kingdom.

My digital work has focused on re-imagining how researchers past and present identify, analyse, and interpret spatial information. Most recently, I have focused on developing new techniques to examine the spatial information in two types of sources: encyclopedias and maps. With colleagues in France (on the GEODE project), I am working to understand Enlightenment approaches to writing about place. My work with maps has led to the creation of a new software library: MapReader. MapReader makes it possible for historians to ask questions of thousands of maps. It was awarded the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History in 2023, and is the only software to have ever been honoured. MapReader first emerged as a collaborative output from the Living with Machines project (check out this video from our docuseries), and it also now builds on work completed in the Machines Reading Maps project. Machines Reading Maps focused on testing state-of-the-art methods for detecting and recognizing text on maps. A highlight of the project is the dataset of 110 million words found on 57,000 maps in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: you can search this dataset and view results at https://www.davidrumsey.com/.

Since 2023, I have continued to work on the legacy of Living with Machines on the new AHRC-funded Data/Culture: Building sustainable communities around Arts and Humanities datasets and tools project at the Turing, in particular on community building around MapReader and historical British newspaper datasets.

I welcome proposals from PhD students:

• with a focus on eighteenth-century French history, especially those with interests in rural topics, information/infrastructure and the environment, archival histories, and taxation;
• interested in the history of French or British early modern and modern maps and mapping practices;
• interested in using digital methods to study any aspect of French history in the long eighteenth century
• from fields and disciplines outside of History who wish to use of computer vision, text analysis, or other computational methods to examine historical documents.

I am also happy to hear from potential MA students who wish to learn more about opportunities at Lancaster.