I have experience applying geospatial technologies in industry, academic research and cultural heritage institutions.

Before joining King’s, I worked at the British Library as lead curator for digital maps where I oversaw the legal deposit of geospatial data and managed the Georeferencer crowd-sourcing project. In that role I was also PrincipaI Investigator of Locating a National Collection, a Towards a National Collection foundational project funded by the AHRC. My PhD in South Asian archaeology from the University of Cambridge titled ‘Buddhism and Donation: Rock-cut Buddhist monasteries of the Western Ghats’ made use of Geographical Information Systems for spatial analysis and data management.

I later published a book on this topic with George Michell. Following my PhD I worked on two collaborative history projects funded by the ERC, Beyond Boundaries and Mapping the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire, and then as a software developer at startups and agencies. I am secretary of the Pelagios network and co-coordinator of the network’s Visualisation activity where I help a community of research projects connect data through standards and adopt common geographical tools and methods. 

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

My primary research interests are heritage, geography and software development. I am interested in understanding how audiences engage with visualisations and digital cartography through ideation and development.

I would be interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

• Geography and heritage
• Web maps, GIS and the spatial humanities
• History, heritage and digital applications in South Asia

Teaching

I teach on a range of courses across the department related to publishing, software development, industries, Internet culture and the web. I am interested in embedding practice-based approaches to digital learning within higher education.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Working on the Locating a National Collection project I led a group of partners from across the UK’s heritage sector including British Library, National Trust, Portable Antiquities Scheme, Historic Royal Palaces, English Heritage, Museum of London Archaeology, Historic England and Historic Environment Scotland. Academic institutions included University of Exeter and Austrian Institute of Technology.

The project developed a method that used geography to dissolve barriers between the collections of historical environment organisations and Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) at scale. Locating a National Collection adopted a user-centred approach to software development based on audience research like focus groups. The project’s reusable Peripleo map interface has been adopted by several cultural heritage institutions including the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, the National Library of Israel and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Selected Publications

• Rees, G. and C. Fleet. 2024. ‘To Archive or to Access? Toward a Rationale for Digital-Map Collecting at the Legal Deposit Libraries of the UK and Ireland’, Journal of Map & Geography Libraries 20(1), 1–24.
• Rees, G., A. Hunt, V. Vitale, J. Horgan and P. Strachan. 2022. ‘Discovering the local in national cultural heritage collections. How web maps can help the UK public engage with their ‘own places’, Information, Communication & Society 26(15), 2885–2903.
• Rees, G., S. Gadd, J. Horgan, A. Hunt, L. Isaksen, V. Morris, A. Musson, R. Simon, P. Strachan, and V. Vitale. 2022. ‘Locating a National Collection project report’, Towards a National Collection.
• Rees, G. 2021. ‘Buddhism and trade: Interpreting the distribution of rock-cut monasteries in the Western Ghats mountains, India using least-cost paths’, Archaeological Research in Asia 28, 1–16.
• Rees, G., N. de Lange and A. Panayotov. 2018. ‘Mapping the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire using GIS’ in A. Zerbin and J. Yoo (eds) Migration, Diaspora and Identity in the Near East from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. 104–121. London: Ashgate.
• Michell, G. and G. Rees. 2017. Buddhist Rock-cut Monasteries of the Western Ghats. Delhi: Jaico.
• Rees, G. and F. Yoneda. 2013. ‘Celibate Monks and Foetus-stealing Gods: Buddhism and Pregnancy at the Jetavana Monastery, Shravasti, India’, World Archaeology 45.2. 252–271.