Abstract
This article introduces a digital platform for collaborative research on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, focusing on networks of Chinese temples and associations extending from Southeast China to the various port cities of Southeast Asia. The Singapore Historical Geographic Information System (SHGIS) and the Singapore Biographical Database (SBDB) are expandable WebGIS platforms gathering and linking data on cultural and religious networks across Southeast Asia. This inter-connected platform can be expanded to cover not only Singapore but all of Southeast Asia. We have added layers of data that go beyond Chinese Taoist, Buddhist, and popular god temples to also display the distributions of a wide range of other religious networks, including Christian churches, Islamic mosques, Hindu temples, and Theravadin, which are the Taiwanese, Japanese and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries found across the region. This digital platform covers a larger area than the Taiwan History and Culture in Time and Space (THCTS) historical GIS platform but is more regionally focused than the ECAI (Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative) By incorporating Chinese inscriptions, extensive surveys of Chinese temples and associations, as well as archival and historical sources, this platform provides new materials and new perspectives on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This paper: (1) outlines key research questions underlying these digital humanities platforms; (2) describes the overall architecture and the kinds of data included in the SHGIS and the SBDB; (3) reviews past research on historical GIS; and provides (4) a discussion of how incorporating Chinese epigraphy of Southeast Asia into these websites can help scholars trace networks across the entire region, potentially enabling comparative work on a wide range of religious networks in the region. Part 5 of the paper outlines technical aspects of the WebGIS platform.
Highlights
In 1995, in an early instance of the application of historical geographic information systems (GIS) mapping to the study of the regional cultures of China, Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman (Xiamen University) explored the historical social and cultural transformations of the irrigated alluvial Putian plains of Fujian province (Dean and Zheng 2010, 2019a)
The construction of a localized historical GIS for this 464 km2 area with 720 villages enabled the testing of various hypotheses on the reasons for the evolution of a regional ritual alliance system with a nested hierarchy of temples from the mid-Ming onwards
The higher order temples of this ritual alliance system were the centers for the management of the irrigation systems of the region, which had grown too complex to be efficiently managed by large lineages controlling segments of the irrigation system
Summary
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