Lecture | CMGI Brown Bag Seminar
New light on the modern night. Computationally tracking “invisible flâneurs” in Antwerp police records (1876-1939)
- Date
- Wednesday 26 February 2025
- Time
- Serie
- CMGI Brown Bag Seminars 2024-2025
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
In this talk, Lith LeFranc presents her ongoing PhD research on the social (in)equalities of Antwerp nightlife during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While historical research on the urban night has traditionally focused on the top-down modernisation of urban infrastructure such as street lighting and police surveillance, recent studies have shifted attention to the lived experiences of urban spaces (for the Low Countries: Van den Heuvel, 2020; De Koster, 2021; Pluskota e.a., 2022). Building on this historiographical shift, my project employs a data-driven approach to analyse a large corpus of local police reports. I use computational techniques such as handwritten text recognition and named entity recognition, to semi-automatically map individuals who ventured out at night. By examining their gender, age, class, and origin, I aim to shed new light on the social dynamics that shaped the nocturnal urban landscape during its modernisation period.