Design and Construction of the Spatiotemporal Information Platform for the Interpretation of ShiJi

Abstract

Developed by the project “Digitally Innovating Academic Settings” from the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, the ShiJi Spatio-Temporal Information Platform is an integrated system to present historical information about people, places, relations, and events in Records of the Grand Historian, also known by its Chinese name ShiJi, in its spatial and temporal context. Built upon linked data infrastructure from various scholarly research projects, the platform is committed to the availability and accessibility of historical, geographical, and topological data and research results for the benefit of researchers, scholars, and students. The web of data comprises three major datasets: texts in ShiJi with supplementary texts from related historical materials, historic maps made by Professor Panqing Xu, and the database Chinese Civilization in Time and Space. The texts in ShiJi are reorganized from a series of biographies into three hundred and sixty main sections and around one thousand and two hundred historical events in chronological order, spanning over two thousand and five hundred years from the ancient Yellow Emperor to the Han Dynasty. The relevant texts of each event are accompanied by corresponding maps, which are created by digitizing and georeferencing, and then overlaying or aligning them on world shaded relief and world street map provided by public web map tile service. Following a given timeline on the platform, the users will be able to travel back in time, smoothly navigate the cities in ancient China by clicking on names of cities in the texts or zooming in and out on the map, and explore in detail how or where a historical or geographical event occurred and its continuous development, for instance, a course of a war or military powers change. With space as a connecting factor, the platform provides a concrete illustration of the research potential of linking textual data with map data, facilitating a greater scale of digital humanities research.