Britt and Ferla | Pauliceia 2.0 - Collaborative Mapping of the History of São Paulo (1870-1940)
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 03/05/2022

Pauliceia 2.0 – Collaborative Mapping of the History of São Paulo (1870-1940) An experiment of open science in digital humanities 

Andrew Britt (University of North Carolina School of the Arts, USA) and Luís Ferla (Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brazil)

The digital humanities are becoming a growing and unavoidable reality for those working with historical knowledge. They have gained intellectual and institutional footing among scholars across disciplines, who have proceeded from arguing for their potential to discussing their practice and implications. Such discussions include the question of defining an epistemological identity for the field, along with the theoretical and practical implications for scholarship and within the institutional structures that evaluate a scholar’s work.

Framed by open science and digital humanities, this project aims to design and build a computational platform for collaborative historical research. The principal goal is to develop state-of-the-art software tools that allow humanities researchers to create, organize, store, integrate, process and publish urban history data sets. The proposed platform will integrate all these tools.

The project foresees the development and release in the worldwide web of a digital historical cartographic database of São Paulo city covering the period of its urban and industrial modernization (1870-1940). The platform will provide access to this database and allow interaction among researchers, who will be able to contribute to the database events that can be spatially and temporally represented. In doing so, scholars will be able to produce maps and visualizations of their own research and at the same time contribute to the data within the system. This project will enrich understanding of the history of São Paulo during the above-mentioned period in addition to offering an innovative model of research for the digital humanities that fosters collaborative work and free knowledge flow.

The first phase of the project, focusing on a pilot area corresponding to São Paulo’s city center, was carried out from February 2017 to January 2020. The beta version of the platform is available on the internet for testing. The second phase will expand the spatial coverage, the platform functionalities, and community engagement. It will also create a guide to allow other researchers to replicate the approaches in other cities.

For more information about the 2022 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org