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11th June: “Finding Alternatives to Web Mercator in the Geography of Sloane’s Collection”, open talk by Dr. Gethin Rees

Next Tuesday, 11th June (16:30 CEST) Dr. Gethin Rees will give a talk titled “Finding Alternatives to Web Mercator in the Geography of Sloane’s Collection”. This presentation is a part of the Sloane Lab Symposium Series, which is organised in collaboration with HDSN (TU Darmstadt), the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies (UCL IAS).

The event will be held in online format via Zoom. In order to see the full program of the Symposium Series and book a place please navigate to Eventbrite page.

The abstract of the talk is as follows:

This presentation offers a critical evaluation of the Web Mercator projection and its use to visualise and present humanities and heritage data. How can the historical processes that formed collections inform the design of web maps? Ongoing research as a Sloane Lab community fellow links and visualises digital collections from the British Museum and British Library using web maps. The Web Mercator projection predominates in web mapping yet is unsuitable for the aims of Sloane Lab, first, due to well-documented visual compromises —the inflation of landmasses at high latitudes like Europe at the expense of others like Africa and the Caribbean— that hamper visual analysis and recreate global inequities. Second, the projection has a history, entangled with processes like colonialism, empire and slavery that also shaped Sloane’s collection. Web map components including Open Layers and MapBoxGL offer different projections and issues in implementation will be discussed.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
valentinaprishchepova (June 3, 2024). 11th June: “Finding Alternatives to Web Mercator in the Geography of Sloane’s Collection”, open talk by Dr. Gethin Rees. HDSM. Retrieved June 14, 2025 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/3316


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