News from the GeoLab

Posted on March 31, 2025 at 11:13 am by brousseau

GeoREACH Lab Director Dr. Joshua MacFadyen, and Graduate Research Assistant D. Bailey Clark have been busy these past few months!

In early February, Josh and Bailey, with the assistance of former research assistant Nolan Kressin, posted What Was Here? Four GeoPEI Map Collections and the Bookends of British Settlement on Prince Edward Island, on the Acadiensis blog. This article describes how they used GeoPEI: The Prince Edward Island Historical Map Viewerto demonstrate PEI history over a series of maps and atlases, from Samuel Holland’s 1765 survey to the Cummins’ Atlas of 1928.

Later in February, they discussed their work on Josh’s 2023 book, Time Flies: A History of Prince Edward Island from the Air with Matthew McCrae on the Hidden Island podcast of the PEI Museum & Heritage Foundation: https://mjmcrae.podbean.com/e/charting-the-past-historic-island-maps-with-josh-macfadyen-and-d-bailey-clark/

Time Flies, Online Edition, a web-based story map companion to the book, was published shortly after: https://www.upei.ca/communications/news/2025/03/new-e-book-time-flies-online-edition-explores-changes-pei-landscapes and Josh and Bailey were subsequently interviewed by Sheryl MacKay on CBC PEI’s Mainstreet radio show (https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-130-mainstreet-pei/clip/16133066-time-flies-a-history-prince-edward-island-air)

Josh also discussed the book and online story map with Nicole O’Byrne on the Witness to Yesterday podcast of the Champlain Society: https://champlainsociety.utppublishing.com/digital-content/champlain-podcast/time-flies-history-prince-edward-island-air-with-joshua-macfadyen

Josh will be presenting on Prince Edward Island history and land use at several public meetings this spring and summer, including the Coalition for the Protection of PEI Lands, the Federation of Prince Edward Island Municipalities, the Belfast Historical Society, and the Sir Andrew Macphail Homestead.

GeoPEI: The Prince Edward Island Historical Map Viewer is available on our website here.
Time Flies, Online Edition is available on our website here.

Workshop: Mapping Rural Lives and Environments in the Atlantic Region

Posted on May 18, 2022 at 4:37 pm by mmaddison

Mapping Rural Lives and Environments in the Atlantic Region: An Atlantic Canada Studies Conference 2022 Digital Humanities Workshop

*Unloading barrels of apples, Falmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, ca. 1929*. Canada Science and Technology Museum, *Image No.: CN000789.*

Wednesday, May 25, 2022, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm ADT

Hosted by Dr. Joshua MacFadyen, Canada Research Chair in Geospatial Humanities,
and the GeoREACH Lab, University of Prince Edward Island

Join us as historians, librarians, and other scholars share new ways to use digital tools to explore rural environmental history in Atlantic Canada.

Digital Vizualization Lab, Harriet Irving Library, UNB Fredericton
Remote option: Zoom

Keynote Sessions:

The Rural Diary Archive
Dr. Cathy Wilson
Redelmeier Professor in Rural History
Department of History, College of Arts, University of Guelph

Topic Modeling and Rural Diaries
Grace Fishbein
ACENET

Farm Energy Profiles and New Data Visualisation Tools
Dr. Joshua MacFadyen and Dr. Margot Maddison-MacFadyen
GeoREACH Lab, University of Prince Edward Island

Register by Tuesday, 24 May, 2022, at 4:00 pm ADT to attend remotely via Zoom (in-person registration is closed):

https://forms.gle/aRPimVsGmP9gUAFH6

This workshop considers new digital humanities (DH), quantitative research, and other approaches to documents such as rural diaries and life writing that in the past have largely received a qualitative focus.

We hope that this small focused workshop at the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference will bring together scholars to learn about these emerging DH methods and to build capacity for new rural, agricultural, and environmental history based on digital collections in the Atlantic region.