Cross-cultural Encounters in the Survey of India in the Mid-nineteenth Century

This PowerPoint presentation describes the Coleridge Fellowship 2025-26. The research used digital methods to extract data from ten printed reports of the Survey of India’s Topographical Survey from 1864 and 1873. The data produced included the names of survey staff, the Survey Parties they worked for, the places in which they worked, and the maps produced. It aimed to use the extracted data to examine cross-cultural relationships between ‘Native Surveyors’ and other staff in the Survey Parties. This presentation describes all the stages of research, reflects on its success, and describes opportunities to build on it.