Historical maps are at the heart of this research project.
Maps ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in present-day Belgium will be carefully selected. The maps include landscape features as well as place names. The textual and figurative data will be extracted from the maps to be eventually processed with methods from the digital humanities. The main providers of these maps are the Belgian State Archives (Rijksarchief in België) and the National Geographical Institute in Belgium. These institutions store high-quality digitised maps that lend themselves perfectly to historical-geographical research.
The selected source corpus is georeferenced in GIS (Geographical Information Systems). This means that historical maps are overlaid on a current map and projected onto a particular projection system. In this way, historical data can be represented geographically and made usable for GIS-editing and -analysis.
