Understanding Comparative Beliefs Visualized: Pedagogy and the Power of GIS in the Contextualizing of Historical Taiwan

Abstract

This paper will provide an overview of the historical influences that are the subject of the time-mapping visualization of Taiwan, primarily from the perspective of how those influences affected the island’s original inhabitants. This narrative accompanies a description of the mapping project itself—part of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative based at UC Berkeley—including details related to the source of historical/geographical data and the digitization of that data for dynamic representation. This project is centred on the cultural resources and experience of Taiwan, which today faces issues of aboriginal language extinction, identification and access to cultural resources, the teaching of history in public education, and adapting to a multicultural identity, all of which are components of cultural resource management (CRM), and all of which would be served well by the CRM technology and programs of which this project can be considered a pilot project.