Constructing an event centred modelling process to produce spatial and temporal data for the critical study of the impact of British colonial rule (1878 – 1960) on the Cypriot landscape through their anti-malarial campaigns

Malaria is a widespread, mosquito-borne, potentially lethal infectious disease that affects humans and other animals. Its prevention and treatment have been targeted in science and medicine for hundreds of years. During the 20th century it was widespread in the Middle East, including Cyprus, and was one of the most important health hazards worldwide. In 1967, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Cyprus as malaria-free, an impressive feat considering malaria had plagued the island since the Roman period (Demetrios, 2009). We conducted a critical analysis of anti-malarial campaigns on urban and rural districts in Cyprus, under British colonial rule (1878 – 1960), in the context of malarial disease knowledge in health surveillance and care policy. Under the HIGH-PASM (High-resolution palaeoclimate records and social vulnerability for the last Millennium) project, we present a methodology for constructing database tools relative to heterogeneously distributed historical sources. The aim of this research is to study the impact of the anti-malarial works on the Cypriot landscape as the social-political situation and the methods implemented did not follow the stringent protocols that exist today. Main issues are the complexity regarding British, Ottoman and French social and political roles, ground truth data extracted from historical sources - that need critical analysis, and the complex phenomena under scope. Primary sources are annual medical reports, written by British medical officers, published from 1913 to 1953. The main focus of these actions linked geography to healthcare issues by eliminating the newly identified malaria-vector by directly influencing the mosquito’s habitat, thus indirectly affecting the Cyprus landscape. The assertion, verification and evaluation of the before mentioned actions requires the medical reports to be contextually placed alongside secondary sources (for example correspondences, journal articles, conference proceedings, etc), which were produced or disseminated during this time period by different actors or groups of actors. We aim to apply methodologies used in digital humanities and conceptual modelling within geosciences to verify and understand spatial-temporal information that may be found within archival references. Raw data are extracted from a small corpus to produce meta-data (data sense ((Hui, 2015)) using existing cultural heritage vocabularies (CIDOC CRM base and extensions) relative to different fields and objects to model spatial-temporal events and align these data with authority databases using W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) semantic web standards (technologies). Given the British colonial role in the governance of the island, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the choices of techniques or actions employed. Thus, this meta-data conceptual modelling and raw data collection, as a data management approach, offers a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic understanding of archival sources. This methodology ultimately aims to study the impact on the landscape of the anti-malarial campaigns by bridging gaps in existing literature by the digitisation of physical reports and digitalisation of a healthcare system from the late 19^th to 20^th century.