As the year is coming to an end, we are looking back upon the last couple of months, in which our Amsterdam Time Machine Team has been busy presenting their research projects on various different academic conferences and workshops.
In September, postdoctoral researcher Janna Aerts took the night train to Vienna, where she participated in the interdisciplinary conference Life Narrative and the Digital, organised by the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage. This two-day event brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the possibilities, uses and challenges of digital methods and technologies for auto/biographical research and practice. During the workshop part of the conference, Janna presented her research on Digital Humanities and Life Narratives, in which she constructs a deep map of Amsterdam based on the autobiographical work of Toby Vos and Prof. Soortkill of the Smibanese University.
On 17 October, Leon van Wissen and Janna Aerts joined the workshop ‘Reading maps in the Digital Age’ on the use of digital methods to deal with historical maps at the University of Antwerp. The event immediately took an impressive start with the morning session, in which the team from the Alan Turing Institute presented and demonstrated two of their projects, MapReader and Machines Reading Maps. The afternoon programme consisted of three thematic sessions (Computer Vision, Historical maps, Pipelines and Workflows) in which various colleagues presented their ongoing research. Leon and Janna discussed the backbone and various applications of Amsterdam’s geo-infrastructure.
Later that month, from 26 until 28 October, Janna Aerts also participated in the conference on Urban Lives: Amsterdam Diaries and Other Stories of the Self, organised by the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The three-day event was packed with interesting talks, four different keynotes, a city walk and masterclass, and concluded with a roundtable. During the conference, Janna gave a presentation on studying Amsterdam’s urban history through life narratives, by focusing on the case study of Toby Vos’ drawings of Amsterdam.
We are very happy that we got the opportunity to present all of our hard work on such welcoming workshops and conferences, meet new colleagues and join new networks, participate in fascinating discussions and be inspired to take new directions within our research. Keep an eye on our website to be notified of any of our future events and presentations!
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