Historical DEM – 4th April 2022

dr chris sevara (nush, newcastle university)

This workshop was coordinated by Chris Sevara, and took place in person. It is the first of a series of workshops organised by NUSH, on advanced geospatial applications in the humanities.

In this workshop we learned how to create a high-resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) from historical aerial photos, and how to validate it and compare it with modern DEM (usually from airborne laser scanner – ALS). These historical DEMs can be used, for example, to assess the preservation of cultural heritage, to monitor the evolution of local morphologies and to estimate the degree of erosion in vulnerable areas.

If you want to know more about the method and its application, you can refer to this paper:

Sevara C., Verhoeven G., Doneus M., Draganits E. 2018. Surfaces from the Visual Past: Recovering High-Resolution Terrain Data from Historic Aerial Imagery for Multitemporal Landscape Analysis. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 25: 611-642.