🔎 🚀 Thrilled to share that our article ‘Projecting the World: The Mediated Geography of the Projection Lantern in Belgium c.1900-c.1920’ was just published in the Journal of Historical Geography.

Working with Margo Buelens-Terryn, we analyzed over 5,600 announcements for magic lantern lectures in Belgian newspapers. Based on the places mentioned in these announcements, we produced maps of the ‘imagined geography’ that this medium enabled in early twentieth-century Belgium.

We show that in this virtual world, the Belgian colony of Congo was relatively close, while it was almost impossible to visit South America. While previous research has underlined the representation of far-away and exotic places, our research demonstrates that audiences most prominently used the projection lantern to take trips in their own country.

Full article here

Data and code here

Please get in touch if you have any feedback!

Figure from the paper
Figure from the paper