Dr. Batchelor Gives Talk for Singapore Project

September 23, 2020

On September 23, Robert Batchelor, Professor of History and Director of Digital Humanities at Georgia Southern, gave the opening talk along with famed historian of cartography Matthew Edney for the Yale and National University of Singapore project Digital Historical Maps of Southeast Asia.  The Zoom conference was hosted in Singapore, with a global audience of over 150 people. 

Dr. Batchelor discussed the first map collection in Singapore, made during the 1930’s using photostat technology that had been developed right before World War I.  During World War II, the Japanese took a copy of Matteo Ricci’s famous world map in Chinese from this collection during the occupation of Singapore, which at the time was only known to exist in London at the Royal Geographical Society and in Rome at the Vatican.  The theme of the talk was about what happens to maps when you photograph and now digitize them, and it dovetailed with work coming out of Georgia Southern’s Digital Humanities Lab in tandem with the World Historical Gazetteer at the University of Pittsburgh.

The talk is the first in a series of events related to the Singapore project that can be registered for through the website (https://historicmapssea.commons.yale-nus.edu.sg/events/).