whitehorsepress

At the ESEH Conference in Bern this month, The White Horse Press was delighted, as ever, to award the Poster Prize. A judging committee comprising Sarah Johnson (of WHP), Marianna Dudley (ESEH Vice-President), Sebastian Depretto (University of Bern) and Anastasia Fedotova (ESEH regional representative for Russia) examined a dozen posters and concluded that Bob Pierik and Petra van Dam deserved the highest award for their ‘Who Drinks which Water?’ which combines graphic clarity, immediate attractiveness, and the effective integration of a lot of information and types of images without being text-heavy or cluttered. In short, the prototype academic poster! Bob introduces the poster briefly below and a higher-resolution version can be found via the following doi.

Citation: Pierik, Bob; Van Dam, Petra, 2023, “Who drinks which water?”, https://doi.org/10.17026/SS/L8MCKA, DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities, V2 

Our poster is meant as an introduction to the Coping with Drought project. We tried to capture three abstract themes in environmental history with case-studies from our research. The first theme ‘plurality’ is meant to show that water in early modern society was not a single entity, but that there was a lot of variation of water sources. With ‘locality’, we wanted to show this diversity across geographic scales: from the micro-infrastructure of a cistern to the much larger scale of the water infrastructure of the entire Dutch Republic. Finally, with ‘environmental (in)justice’, we raise the question to what extent water access varied, as especially poorer neighbourhoods and households had poorer access to water.