Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Stefan Huebner, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Digital scholarship methods can provide new insights into Singapore’s epidemic, environmental, and urban history. Our interdisciplinary team of historians, biologists, and GIS experts has built a platform that features more than 60 new digital layers created from historical maps and historical climate data. Our pilot project arranges these layers in three interactive subsets on “vegetation cover change”, “extreme weather events”, and “malaria epidemics”. We also developed three related thematic scrollymaps, which draw on our digital layers and create map- and image-based narratives aimed at the historically interested public.

The seminar includes five presentations given by the team members, who will introduce the outcomes of our pilot project, share experiences about the implementation process, and discuss the value of digital scholarship methods for research and education purposes. Afterwards, the platform, digital layers, and scrollymaps will be made available to the public and for specialist use in other projects.

Kenneth Dean: Our GIS in the Context of Singapore’s Digital Scholarship Landscape
Stefan Huebner: Initial Ideas, Interdisciplinary Collaborations, Research Goals, and Future Plans
Reuben W. X. Wang: GIS Building and Digital Scholarship from a Technical Point of View
Fiona Williamson: The “Extreme Weather Events” Scrollymap and Rainfall Layers
Tyrone Tan: Approaching Singapore’s “Malaria Epidemics” since the 1960s through Digital Scholarship
Rachel Teng: The Eco-Business Scrollymap on ‘A City in Nature’

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Fiona Williamson has curated the project’s scrollymap on “Extreme weather events”, provided the related historical rainfall data, and is Associate Professor at Singapore Management University.

Kenneth Dean is Co-Principal Investigator of the project, Leader of the “Religion and Globalisation” cluster at Asia Research Institute, and Head of the Chinese Studies Department at National University of Singapore. His other historical GIS projects can be found at http://shgis.nus.edu.sg/.

Rachel Teng is a journalist at The HomeGround Asia, with a background in Environmental Studies (Biology). She worked as an editorial intern for Eco-Business, an independent digital news site dedicated to sustainable development. For her final year thesis, she contributed to Eco-Business’ special report on the fate of Singapore’s remaining forests, which has since been awarded silver for Best Project for News Literary at the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards Asia 2021. 

Reuben W. X. Wang is the project’s GIS expert and master student at the University of Edinburgh.

Stefan Huebner is Principal Investigator of the project, and Senior Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute. He is Co-Principal Investigator of the SSRC project titled “Linking the Digital Humanities to Biodiversity History in Singapore and Southeast Asia”.

Tyrone Tan has co-curated, together with Yeo Huiqing (Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore), the project’s scrollymap on “Malaria epidemics.” He is a research assistant in the Reproductive Evolution Lab at the Department of Biological Sciences (National University of Singapore) who is working on mosquitoes.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.