Prof. Griet Vankeerberghen co-awarded SSHRC Insight Development Grant

Congratulations to Prof. Griet Vankeerberghen, who is the co-recipient with Raja Sengupta (Department of Geography) of an Insight Development Grant.

The project, entitled Representing the Mobility of Historical Agents through Digitization, Topographic Path Finding and Dynamic Visualization: the Case of the Western Han Nobles, takes as its point of departure the lack of accessible tools available to historians to analyze and visualize the movements of people and goods. Not only is the geographical movement of people and goods a major contributing factor to the constitution of empires or other political entities throughout history, an enhanced understanding of the routes taken by historical travelers will allow historians to think in more detail about how mobility was experienced. Professors Vankeerberghen and Sengupta propose the development of a truly open and user-friendly tool to analyze the mobility of historical agents through advanced spatio-temporal analysis methods like Geovisualization and Agent-Based Models (ABMs). Focusing on the mobility of a particular group of agents in early imperial China (the nobles of Western Han), they will develop a tool that has three specific functionalities that are hitherto unavailable to most historians without advanced training in GIS.