ECAI Shanghai Conference

The Second Congress of Electronic Atlases on the campus of Fudan University, Shanghai, promises to be another outstanding ECAI event. We have papers from fifteen nations dealing with a host of projects including those that focus on China. I am especially pleased to have the Berkeley-France Shanghai Project making a report on the work that members of that group have been doing over the past few years. It is appropriate that this project be featured given the location of the Congress.
Our host for this meeting will be Prof. Ge Jianxiong, from the Geography Department of Fudan University. He has been tireless in his planning and offers to ECAI hospitality that will provide us with many experiences of the city, the region, and the local campus. We are all deeply grateful to him for his efforts.
A few of the additional special events will center around the Harvard - Fudan Historical GIS for China, under the direction of Professor Peter Bol. The Korea University team is giving a presentation of the developing Electronic Cultural Atlas of Korea. We also look forward to hearing from the teams that are working on historical gazetteers, and the continuing work on ECAI publications.
Plans are already being formulated for the next ECAI meeting, November 1-3, hosted by the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. This will be a joint meeting with the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) and we expect to explore a number of important new issues as well as continuing the discussions already underway. Please make a note of this date on your calendar.

Delmer Brown Honored

Professor Delmer Brown was honored on the occasion of his 96th birthday on the Berkeley campus. He described his long career in Japanese History and gave special emphasis to the ECAI project that he heads: The Japanese Historical Text Initiative, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/JHTI/. This project makes available online, the primary texts of Japanese history, with translations and linking software. It has become a major source of study for the creation of Japanese gazetteer entries. ECAI is proud to join in wishing Professor Brown the very best as he continues to be a productive and innovative scholar. He serves as an inspiration to us all.

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Luce Project: Religious Atlas of China

Work continues on the collection of place name and feature type data for the Religious Atlas of China. The Chinese names are being collected under the auspices of the University of the West, in Los Angeles, and then will be passed along to the Harvard Historical GIS for China, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/, to be included in that source. The Tibetan place names are also been listed by a team at the Berkeley campus and transferred to the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library at the University of Virginia, http://iris.lib.virginia.edu/tibet/index.html. ECAI will work to provide links between all of these sites as the project matures over the next year.

Austronesian Cultures in Taiwan

The ECAI web site reports the ongoing work of ECAI's Austronesian team, under the leadership of Scholar David S. Blundell. Dynamic online maps depict recent field work on the ancient cultural and linguistic ties between Taiwan and the Batanes Islands of the Philippines. This work was supported in part by grants from the UC Berkeley Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines Endowment Fund. The fund came to the University through the generosity of the N.W. Lin Foundation for Culture and Education of Taiwan. For more information on the Batanes project, see http://ecai.org/austronesiaweb/ECAIaustronesia/Batanes/Batanes.htm

Support for the Learner: What, Where, When and Who

During its first six months this project has drafted a mapping between the Feature Types used in the National Geo-intelligence Agency and the Library of Congress Subject Headings and is working on the design of a directory of Named Time Periods, analogous to a gazetteer of named places. The Named Time Period directory will include codes for type of period, calendar dates, and geographical context. An initial set of 2,000 Named Times Period records is being derived from the chronological subdivisions used in the Library of Congress Subject Headings system. It has been decided to work with university faculty who teach undergraduates in the design and testing of the infrastructure for searching What, Where, When and Who. See http://ecai.org/imls2004

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Director's Report

May 2005