Research Initiatives

ECAI engages in research in various fields of humanities and information technology. Some of these research projects are listed below with the most recent first.

Just announced:
Editorial Practices and the Web
Funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Michael Buckland will lead a collaborative effort with the Emma Goldman Papers (Berkeley), the Margaret Sanger Papers (New York University), the Stanton and Anthony Papers (Rutgers University) and the Labadie Collection (Univ. Of Michigan) to align the preparation of scholarly editions of historical papers with current Web technologies. Details to follow.

Current Projects:

Blue Dots: Text Analysis and Pattern Detection: 3-D and Virtual Reality Environments
Funded by the National Science Foundation
In The Blue Dots Project, Professor Lewis Lancaster, ECAI, University of California, Berkeley explores the design of high dimensional visualizations, analyzing text structure and patterns for humanities scholars. Multi-dimensional interactive visualizations are a normal component of scholarly processes in the sciences and engineering. These tools are highly specialized to support the research processes of specific disciplines. This project adds a complementary capability by developing a visual, ergonomic methodology for interactive search, retrieval, browsing, and analysis within large text corpuses. Linked to the specific needs of humanities researchers it is however not limited to the features of individual languages. The methodology supports corpus browsing, searching, pattern identification, interactive interrogation, and seamless linkage to ‘witnesses’ – digitized texts and images of original manuscripts. Read more

Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies:
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services
This project will demonstrate how auxiliary resources can be made more readily available in a demonstration project using Irish Studies literature. Partners include the Celtic Studies Program and The Emma Goldman Papers project at UC, Berkeley, and the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Read more

Religious Atlas of China and the Himalayas:
Funded by the Henry Luce Foundation
Development began on the Religious Atlas of China and the Himalayas in January 2004. The Atlas is based on a set of historical gazetteers--indexes of georeferenced place names. The Atlas is includes names, dates, coordinates, and associated information for several thousand religious places in China and the Himalayas, including mosques, churches and temples; sacred mountains; religious kingdoms; monumental statuary, and other categories of features.During the second phase of the project, we put our efforts into a site that will contain raw data for manipulation and interpretation by scholars. Our first release in 2010 of the atlas interface will not be an encyclopedia-like description or publication of already completed studies. At the same time, we are preparing the interface so that scholarly studies related to Chinese, Tibetan, and Vietnamese religions can be downloaded into the atlas for others to see and access through the interface. Development of a user interface with complementary contextual data is being developed in collaboration with the Center for GIS, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. When it is completed, we hope users will be able to make maps and time lines, conduct queries to learn how places are linked by sect, place, personage and other characteristics; and link from the brief records in the gazetteer to rich documentation such as images, scholarship, and additional information about each place. The Atlas is a collaborative endeavor being developed by a team of scholars throughout North America, Asia, and Europe.

Examples of Past Research Projects:

Bringing Lives to Light: Biography in Context
Funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Science
This project seeks to enable the more effective use of biographical texts in a digital environment. The goal is to design, demonstrate and evaluate standards and best practices for encoded mark-up, embedded queries, and associated editing tools that can be used to create more powerful digital biographical texts that can in turn be connected to a wider world of contextual information. Read more

Query and Discovery Tools: In collaboration with the UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems, we are working to bring complex discovery techniques to bear on searches of the metadata clearinghouse and on narrowing, organizing and rectifying the resources that are displayed following a first-level search. This will ensure that users can create the most accurate and precise maps possible based on their interests and will aid in achieving the highest degree of interoperability. Additional projects include work focused on effective catalog searching by place using a gazetteer to disambiguate placenames. The Going Places in the Catalog project addresses these issues. More recently a project titled Support for the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who expands catalog searching further by integrating specialized digital library resources: subject catalogs, gazetteers, chronologies, and biographical dictionaries.

GIS for the Humanities: Unlike the fields for which GIS was first developed, humanities scholars often have incomplete, contradictory or ambiguous spatial data. In collaboration with the Polis Center, we are developing a curriculum for training ECAI collaborators in GIS technology and adapting the technology for the needs of these scholars. In collaboration with the UC Berkeley GIS Center, we developed a graduate seminar on the same topic. Karen Kemp, Associate Professor of Geography at Redlands University and an ECAI Strategy Committee member, is also pursuing research on this theme.

Digital Gazetteers: In collaboration with the Academia Sinica Computing Centre, this is a project to extend the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) gazetteer standard to accommodate historical, cultural and multilingual data and to link gazetteers with texts and other resources in the ECAI architecture and link gazetteer data to GIS visualization. This will enable collaborators who do not collect spatial data themselves to see their work linked to maps. ECAI Gazetteer Project.

ePublication Standards Development: ECAI ePublications use GIS and other digital technologies. At the same time, they adhere to conventional standards of rigor, documentation, and review. Working with the California Digital Library ECAI developed an ePublication process that attempts to address some of the main challenges of complex scholarly electronic publications. Several sample publications were developed and one was completed. It was acknowledged that the initiative would be successful only if we can create publications that are understandable and acceptable to the academic community. Therefore, in collaboration with the California Digital Library, workshops and conference panels of diverse academic personnel were organized to comment upon published ECAI projects and the ECAI publication process.