Abstract
The discipline of the humanities has long been inseparable from the exploration of space and time. With the rapid advancement of digitization, databases, and data science, humanities research is making greater use of quantitative spatiotemporal analysis and visualization. In response to this trend, our team developed the Chinese academic map publishing platform (AMAP) with the aim of supporting the digital humanities from a Chinese perspective. In compiling materials mined from China’s historical records, AMAP attempts to reconstruct the geographical distribution of entities including people, activities, and events, using places to connect these historical objects through time. This project marks the beginning of the development of a comprehensive database and visualization system to support humanities scholarship in China, and aims to facilitate the accumulation of spatiotemporal datasets, support multi-faceted queries, and provide integrated visualization tools. The software itself is built on Harvard’s WorldMap codebase, with enhancements which include improved support for Asian projections, support for Chinese encodings, the ability to handle long text attributes, feature level search, and mobile application support. The goal of AMAP is to make Chinese historical data more accessible, while cultivating collaborative opensource software development.
Highlights
Preserved in the vast ancient and modern literature of China, embedded in its unequaled record of human civilization over many millennia and across great regions of land and sea, there exists a vast amount of geographically referenced historic information
Other systems include the Belgian historical geographic information systems (GIS) project at Ghent University, Belgium, the Batanes Islands Cultural Atlas developed by the University of California at Berkeley, the New York City Historical GIS Project developed by the New York City Public Library, and the Historical Geographic Information System developed by Wikipedia, among others
Chinese cultural and historical databases built at Harvard include the Chinese Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS), the Chinese Historical Biographical Database (CBDB), and the many China data and map collections stored in WorldMap
Summary
Preserved in the vast ancient and modern literature of China, embedded in its unequaled record of human civilization over many millennia and across great regions of land and sea, there exists a vast amount of geographically referenced historic information. We suggest that there exists an opportunity to make geographic relationships more explicit, especially those relating to human activities. At the level of an individual, this may include the geographical distribution of his/her place of origin, travel routes, and social relations. For a group, this may involve the group’s distribution and migration trajectory. China contains a holistic collection of geographic information about its people, things, and events throughout history, and we aim to make this information more explicit and usable for scholars. To provide an online place for such materials to be gathered and shared, we developed the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform (AMAP)
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