Clearinghouse Directory Members Area Search | Home

Present: Paul Ell (Chair), David Blundell, Michael Buckland, Damian Evans, Maggie Exon, Ian Gregory, Ruth Mostern, Jeanette Zerneke

Reports from Editorial teams

South Asia - Maggie Exon

No great activity on GIS front but active projects with Australian partners to digitize historical reports by British government officials. Will be continuing work to register historic maps of South Asia and create GIS datasets for historic boundaries. South Asia datasets will be transferred to Berkeley due to problems with storing non-Curtin data on Curtin servers.

Austronesia – David Blundell

The linguistic atlas project now extends from Japanese, through the Formosan languages, Micronesia, New Guinea, Australia, to Madagascar and Polynesia. This process has been aided by cooperation between the Academia Sinica and Larry Crissman at Griffith. The material is partially in the clearinghouse although Larry’s data has still to be converted.

David is working on a test project for an area of the Northern Philippines which will use the atlas data as context for more detailed information. David believes that workshops are needed to educate users about the possibilities of such information and reassure the communities involved that information gathered from them will not be misused.

British Isles – Paul Ell

There are a number of funded projects and new initiatives relevant to the British Isles:

• £900,000 from JISC for digitization of British census reports. Further funding is likely with an interest in extending this to Commonwealth countries.
• David Bodenhamer is a visiting scholar in Belfast and cooperating in a number of projects.
• A doctoral student is working on analytical aspects of the Irish famine.
• Two grants of £75,000, one for a community information system for Belfast and the other for either a digital archives for Northern Ireland or a historical GIS for Northern Ireland with a strong community participation element.
• Ian Gregory is being funded for two years at Queens, Belfast, through a Leverhulme Fellowship.
• The Gough Map (ca. 1350) at the Bodleian Library will be imaged, geo-registered and extensively analysed.
• A £100,000 grant will fund the digitization of medieval crop return data.
  Other non-UK projects are:
  • Cooperation with the Dutch on a Netherlands Historical GIS.
  • Coordination of a meeting to discuss a European GIS.
  • Digitisation of Indian historical boundaries for use with Indian census already being digitized.

Other reports

• Ruth reported on the Religion Atlas of China and the Himalayas which is mapping Buddhist sacred sites. The second year of this project will widen the project to other religions.
• There is now a Japanese translation of the clearinghouse.
• The team in Sydney is completing the geo-registration of the Rumsey map collection. They are also working on a project to present GIS data from Cambodia, specifically Angkor.

Conferences

• SSHA – no branded ECAI sessions but ECAI is strongly represented by affiliates and will continue to be in future years.
• Five sessions will take place at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) conference. All sessions will be co-sponsored by ECAI.
• ECAI members will attend the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference.
  2nd. Cultural Atlases Conference, Fudan University, Shanghai.
  The focus will be on China, but papers about any area will be welcomed. There will be ECAI sessions and Paul will send out call for papers.

New publication

The American Missions publication would soon be ready and there were a couple more publications in the pipeline. CDL was still interested in the publications although they could offer no funding.