Digital Humanities Initiative Talk Series

Date: 17 March 2025 (Monday)
Time: 5 PM (HKT)
Via Zoom

Speaker: Dr. Luca Scholz
Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Prof.) in Digital Humanities
University of Manchester
www.lucascholz.com

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About the talk

In recent decades there has been an increased uptake of digital mapping as a method of historical research. While the methodological and thematic concerns of digital spatial history have expanded, most of the maps created in historical research visualize data of phenomena on the surfaces of land and sea and rarely consider the atmosphere that envelops them.

This talk examines how historians and their collaborators map Earth’s atmosphere. Climate historians have long employed a sophisticated visual repertoire that is effective for determining the physical properties of weather and climate but detaches the atmosphere from the human and non-human worlds it envelops. More recently, algorithmic methods of layering data allow scholars to represent the atmosphere at larger scales and in close connection with the human environment, yet their maps remain committed to a physicalist vision of weather and society.

Drawing on Dr. Luca Scholz’s research on the history of weather modification, this talk will discuss the interest in representing weather and climate as they were understood and confronted by historical contemporaries. The wider proposition is that historians might benefit from crafting their own cartographic language rather than borrowing it.

About the speaker

Luca Scholz is Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Prof.) in Digital Humanities and History at the University of Manchester (UK). His work combines archival research and computational methods to study spatial history, intellectual history, and the history of weather and climate.