Dr Katherine McDonough

Lecturer in Digital Humanities

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.

Selected Publications

Beyond the Tracks: re-connecting people, places and stations in the history of late-Victorian railways
Rhodes, J., Lawrence, J., Beelen, K., McDonough, K., Wilson, D.C.S. 1/04/2024 In: Living with Machines. London : University of London 37 p. Electronic ISBN: 9781914477652.
Chapter

MapReader: a computer vision pipeline for the semantic exploration of maps at scale
Hosseini, K., Wilson, D.C.S., Beelen, K., McDonough, K. 11/11/2022
Conference contribution/Paper

Maps of a Nation?: The Digitized Ordnance Survey for New Historical Research
Hosseini, K., McDonough, K., Strien, D.v., Vane, O., Wilson, D.C.S. 30/04/2021 In: Journal of Victorian Culture. 26, 2, p. 284-299. 16 p.
Journal article

Enlightenment Infrastructure: Making Digital Tools to Explore Historical Places
Invited talk

Spatial Nodes and Edges: New Approaches to Networked Historical Data
Public Lecture/ Debate/Seminar

MapReader & Machines Reading Maps
Invited talk

Reading Maps: Making, Searching, and Interpreting Text on Maps
Invited talk

Can you ground truth the past?
Invited talk

MapReader
Invited talk

The ‘Environmental Scan’ at work: radical contextualisation of newspaper collections for new historical research
Oral presentation

The Pelagios Network: Collaboration as a Community of Practice
Oral presentation

Summer school ANHIMO 2023
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Living with Machines
Invited talk

Machines Reading Maps
Invited talk

Machines Reading Maps Summit Workshop @ CESTA
Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Machines Reading Maps Summit
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

Machines Reading Maps
Invited talk

Machines Reading Maps
Invited talk

Alan Turing Institute
Visiting an external academic institution

GeoHumanities '23: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (Journal)
Editorial activity

GeoHumanities '22: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (Journal)
Editorial activity

5th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (Journal)
Editorial activity

Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, GeoHumanities 2019 (Journal)
Editorial activity

Fellow, Royal Historical Society
Election to learned society

Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History
Prize (including medals and awards)