KNAW Humanities Cluster and the Fryske Akademy have started a collaboration around the HisGIS project. Thanks to this collaboration, Prof. Hans Mol and Thomas Vermaut form the new Geo team within the Digital Infrastructure department of the KNAW Humanities Cluster.

From 1 December 2019, the KNAW Humanities Cluster and the Fryske Akademy will be working together in the HisGIS project of Hans Mol and Thomas Vermaut. They are the driving forces behind HisGIS and together they form a Geo team within the Digital Infrastructure department of the KNAW Humanities Cluster. Thomas Vermaut joins the Cluster and Hans Mol is seconded from the Fryske Akademy.

New Geo team

The new Geo team builds tools to extract geographical shapes, such as national borders, and entities from data, to compare historical maps more easily and analyse the new data in different ways. Thanks to the availability of new data sets and the development of new technologies, the possibilities for comparing data in time and space are endless. Gertjan Filarski, director of Digital Infrastructure of the KNAW Humanities Cluster, is enthusiastic about the arrival of Mol and Vermaut. “Within the Humanities and Social Sciences, there is a great demand for a reliable infrastructure to map and visualise data geographically. Hans and Thomas bring an enormous amount of knowledge and expertise. And with the arrival of the HisGIS project, we will also be able to make new infrastructure available within CLARIAH PLUS and Time Machine in the short term.”

Historical TomTom

HisGIS links historical information to digitised maps. His stands for historical and GIS for Geographical Information System. A very common GIS is the TomTom, but with HisGIS you can time travel through the past of the Netherlands. HisGIS is set up by region and by city. Most provinces and a number of large cities have already been mapped. In time, the system must cover the whole of the Netherlands. Because all files are freely available for research, the various Time Machines in the Netherlands also build on HisGIS. The maps and Time Machines are also accessible for general use via a public viewer on www.hisgis.nl.