Reproducing and exploring past events using agent-based geo-historical models

Abstract

The field of “digital humanities” is about using the latest digital methodologies in order to tackle humanities disciplines and social sciences questions. The ARCHIVES project belongs to this new research area. It proposes a methodology to build agent-based models of historical events, in particular crisis events, in order to answer new questions about them or explore them in new ways. In this paper, we present the first implementation of ARCHIVES on the case study of the management of floods in Hà Nội (Việt Nam) in 1926. We show how we collected, digitized and indexed numerous historical documents from various sources, built a historical geographic information system to represent the environment and flooding events and finally designed an agent-based model of human activities in this reconstructed environment. We then show how this model helped us understanding the decisions made by the different actors during this event, testing multiple scenarios and answering several questions concerning the management of the flooding events.