The GIS in Latin America Webinar Series: Latin America from Above and the Pauliceia Project

Pauliceia 2.0 – Collaborative Mapping of the History of São Paulo (1870–1940): An Experiment of Open Science in Digital Humanities

Luis Ferla, Universidade Federal de São Paulo

Framed by open science and digital humanities, this project aims to design and build a computational platform for collaborative historical research. The project foresees the development and online release of a digital historical cartographic database of the city of São Paulo covering the period of its urban and industrial modernization. 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 in addition to offering an innovative model of research for the digital humanities that fosters collaborative work and free knowledge flow.

Viewing Latin America from Above: Using Aerial and Satellite Imagery in Latin American Environmental History
Frederico Freitas, North Carolina State University
Up until the 1970s, many regions of the globe were photographed by analogic, film-based devices mounted on airplanes and first-generation satellites. This presentation discusses the analysis and interpretation of a series of historical images produced from above to understand the evolution of specific human and natural features across time. Freitas will present a chapter of his upcoming book, Nationalizing Nature (Cambridge 2021), which uses historical aerial and satellite images to reconstruct land use and land cover between 1953–2014 in a border area between Brazil and Argentina. He will discuss the challenges of using historical remote sensing techniques to reconstruct past landscapes in Latin America, will address how to use aerial and satellite imagery to interpret what such changes mean, and will introduce a new project on the environmental history of Brasília.
November 9, 2020