Our Seminar Series 2025-26 Mapping Fluid Worlds starts with an exploration of The Flood Necklace by Anne-Laure Fréant. The Flood Necklace is a data-object (or data-sculpture) that embeds water-level data from all recorded flood events of the Loire River in the city of Orléans, spanning 1800 to 2003. This object questions the conventional ways we represent and record flooding (typically through 2D maps) and explores alternative forms for representing, storing, sharing, and remembering environmental histories. It also raises the issue of the “vertical axis”, a dimension critical in river stratigraphy but difficult to visualize without 3D modeling—and even harder to sculpt into physical objects, making our conception of river’s shapes often “present based”. We also present other data-objects that attempted to record and display historical environmental data, as part of an ongoing reflection on river histories representation.

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Anne-Laure Fréant is a geographer by training, having studied natural risks and cultural geography in France and Canada for seven years. After her studies, she began a career in IT but maintained a strong interest in colonial and environmental history, especially in Canada. She discovered the field of data physicalization while working for the French open data administration and is now exploring how the creation of data-objects can enrich the ways we record, understand, and remember environmental history.