I thank Professors Alexander Stolyarov and Mikhail Kulagin of the Russian Academy of Sciences for their wonderful hospitality during the Third Congress of Cultural Atlases held in Moscow, May 29 - June 1. We had 80 registered delegates. Dr. Dayalan, Archaeological Survey of India, gave the plenary address with a description of the problems of preservation of the Taj Mahal.

Join us for ECAI’s 20th meeting in Berkeley, Oct. 18-20, when we will celebrate ECAI’s 10th anniversary. We meet jointly with other conference in conjunction with the opening of Berkeley’s fine new C.V. Starr East Asian Library.

ECAI has received a very generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for Phase II of the Atlas of Chinese Religion, $300,000 for a three years period, June 2007 through May 2010, to continue the geo-registration of Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, and Daoist sites and to add information to each.

Co-Director Buckland and I continue to be busy with conference presentations. I joined with other ECAI affiliates in a panel on temporality at the Digital Humanities conference at the University of Illinois. I return to the mid-west in October to deliver the keynote address at the Chicago Humanities and Computer Science Colloquium at Northwestern University. Michael Buckland has presented at the International Symposium of Digital Earth at UC Berkeley, and at the Knowledge by Network conference in Berlin. In July and August I taught ECAI themes at Korea University in Seoul and helped organize a workshop at Vietnamese Buddhist University in Ho Chih Minh.
The 2009 Fifth Congress of Cultural Atlases will probably be in April in Paris hosted by Franciscus Verellen and the EFEO.

Developments in Belfast

The Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis (CDDA) at Queen’s University Belfast, which hosts the British Isles Regional Team, has received a significant grant of $1,250,000 from the UK-based Joint Information Systems Committee to develop a digital library of core research journals concerned with Irish Studies, and will digitise around 100 current and historical titles, and also selected monographs and manuscripts. The material will be available worldwide through a partnership with JSTOR.

The Centre also announces that its formal agreement to develop international collaboration between Queen’s University, Academia Sinica, and Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis has resulted in its first research project. Academia Sinica has provided more than $40,000 to allow the Center for Geographic Information Science at Academia Sinica led by Fan I-chun, the Polis Center and IUPUI led by David Bodenhamer, and CDDA to work on a pilot project incorporating diary texts into the Academia Sinica China Historical GIS. The diaries, held by Queen’s University, record Robert Hart’s experiences in China serving the Imperial Court from the 1860s to the 1900s. The diaries have many spatial references, photographs and other material that can be geo-located.

A $25,000 grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded a workshop in Belfast attended by a number of ECAI affiliates to assess how the Data Grid, e-Science and GIS might help in e-resource discovery, retrieval, management and analysis of cultural sources.

The Queen’s University has recognised the importance of CDDA’s work with ECAI Central and has invested more than $500,000 in new equipment and laboratory space. This significantly increases the Centre’s ability to develop e-resources from large historical maps, to census data, to historical texts.

Paul S Ell, CDDA Director

In the News

Damian Evans’ research on Angkor Wat

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6945574.stm

Director's Report

August, 2007