Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
Knowledge Holding and Discovery in the Internet Era
Jeanette Zerneke
March 2008
The goal of ECAI is to advance scholarship and understanding through greater attention to time and space. Our underlying hope is to support cultural heritage diversity, complexity, and preservation. The cultural patrimony (in Dutch the erfgoed) of all humans is our shared cultural history on this planet. Our future is to understand and cherish this complexity.
As an initiative, not an institution, ECAI affiliates work in multiple dimensions. ECAI Central at UC Berkeley has several active initiatives at any one time and work proceeds on at least three levels of information and infrastructure. ECAI projects include those whose primary goal is to collect, catalog, and make available specific cultural information. Research activities include focusing on analyzing, organizing, and improving understanding of specific topics or areas. These often include work that is in the nexus between cultural materials, technical tools, and understanding. Thirdly, ECAI participates in activities to support digital humanities and cultural projects on national and global levels.
ECAI affiliates are working on a wide range of projects and issues. A list of past and present ECAI affiliates is on the ECAI web site. ECAI Central works with some of these projects and coordinates collaboration among them. ECAI coordinates two international conferences a year where affiliates are encouraged to meet and present their work on a wide range of issues. ECAI Central also coordinates workshops and training sessions to assist groups in forming their own teams and projects.
As part of the overall ECAI vision, we see a potential for the development of a network of projects that can begin to encompass the history and development of Buddhism in the context of a religious atlas of Asia and eventually the entire world. Several projects already exist in Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. We invite you to join and support this initiative.
Some of the projects on which ECAI central is working with affiliate teams are summarized below.
A collaborative project funded by the Luce foundation to collect information on all the major religious traditions in China. The project has an initial web site at: http://ecai.org/chinareligion.
Collaborators include:
The Atlas links to information about important Buddhist sites and includes dynamic maps with layers displaying the various data collections. The data collected currently includes the location and attribute information on approximately 20,000 active Buddhist Monasteries in China.
The Cultural Atlas Portal links examples of cultural atlases developed globally into a Web Site with a Google Earth Browser. It gives quick access to a wide variety of projects, which demonstrate creative methods or give access to important cultural information collections. The field of cultural atlases is developing quickly and there are many interesting entries in this portal.
Google Earth projects
A couple of new projects using Google Earth interfaces are being developed by ECAI Affiliates in collaboration with ECAI Central.
The Batanes Cultural Atlas project, funded by the Shung Ye Foundation of Taiwan with David Blundell as primary investigator, covers the Islands between Taiwan and the Philippines. The islands have a long history beginning with prehistoric people who traveled among the Batanes Islands and to and from Luzon, Orchid Island (Lan-yu), and Taiwan. The Atlas includes all of the official government maps of the Province, hand drawn maps with annotation of local names, a history timeline, images of villages and historical sites, and cultural art work. The ongoing work includes adding ethnographic information and expanding the project to cover Orchid Island to the north of the Batanes group. The project url is: http://ecai.org/batanesatlas
A project investigating the transition in California from Indigenous Native American village culture to Spanish rancheros is being developed. The pilot project maps the baptism of California Indians and is based on a database developed for the Early California Population Project (ECPP). The initial stages investigate population changes around Mission San Carlos in central California.
Project Updates
Several of ECAI’s Cultural Atlas projects are either being converted to a Google Earth interface or having new optional Google Earth interfaces added.
The focus of this publication is the ivory and bone finds of an early historical period site in modern Afghanistan known as Begram, and what they may suggest about the site and the nature and extent of cultural exchange along the period’s Silk Roads of Central Asia. The web site for the project is: http://ecai.org/begramweb.
The Begram project includes a map of the archaeological site with information on where specific objects were found. The project includes the location of Kushan monuments in the vicinity of the site that were active at approximately the same time. Trade routes of the Silk Road are also mapped. This allows comparison of activities happening at the same time in the region. And, it allows people to use this information to compare with related data, such as Buddhist sites of the same period in other locations and to discover possible routes of knowledge transmission.
The ECAI Silk Road Atlas links historical, geographic, cultural, and religious information. It was developed using the TimeMap software. A new Google Earth interface is under development.
Among other affiliated projects, the atlas links to images from the Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art. http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/
Yungang - Datong - Shanxi Province - Northern Wei Dynasty 425-475 CE / C7266M
ECAI, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of the West, has formed the Sanskrit Web Working Group (SWWG), with a goal of increasing the quantity, uniformity, utility, and longevity of Sanskrit and other Indic texts on the Web. As a first step, the Working Group is developing appropriate standards, practices, and tools, using the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon Website as a test case.
Some our ECAI work with the Institute of Museum and Library Science (IMLS) has addressed the issues involved in integrating beyond the individual cultural atlas to a system of data within a time and place context. This requires different types of tools to effectively navigate between the different contextual dimensions. Effective systems will also let users collect the information they are interested in into profiles or portfolios and use them in a variety of visualization modes.
Cultural atlas design and development
Design requires the ability to bring together diverse resources from distributed providers to create a seamless product. The challenges increase as the amount and complexity of available information increases. It is difficult to make a system that is easy to navigate and presents a complex view of the cultural information. The skills and expertise required to accomplish this includes significant technical and content knowledge. A team of people is usually needed to bring together all the necessary skills.
Learning methodologies from scholars who have been working on these subjects for many years can save much time and avoid having to recreate or redesign systems. For instance, it is best to catalog your information on the smallest reasonable level of granularity possible. For example, if you have a collection of photographs, information on each image is usually preferable. Cataloging to include metadata on time and location at the smallest possible level of your data is also encouraged. Using WGS80 standard latitude and longitude is suggested. However, you can’t make up location and time information if it is not available. Generalized information or ranges are better than nothing. Including documentation on the source of your information and the level of certainty and precision about your information is essential.
Creating a new generation global digital library - Digital Library 2.0…
The next generation digital library will bring together both the user interface tools for transactional use (view, sort, store, manipulate and redisplay) of a wide range of information and behind the scenes integration of massive amounts of data within multiple contextual dimensions. Collaboration of communities is needed in order to bring together the physical infrastructure, integration software, management processes, digital reference works, and interface tools needed for a digital library.
The potential benefits of creating these new resources are myriad. It is possible to see new patterns in long know facts. It is possible to return to original source materials such as locations of archaeological finds with similar artifacts to discover trade patterns and to compare this to written and oral traditions of migration data. A new understanding of the development and dispersal of cultures becomes possible.
As a long-term vision, ECAI affiliates have been discussing the possibility of a distributed, Religious Atlas of Asia. This would involve collaboration between working groups to create a network of affiliated projects working toward enabling cross project integration of information.
Initial stages include collecting location and time information for temples, monasteries, shrines, and other religious sites. In parallel, work is proceeding on digital texts to indicate references to places and people. Digitization of inscriptions, through rubbings or other methods, and recovery of damaged materials through high tech methods are adding to the corpus of overall information. Historical image collections need to be digitized and hosted in a fashion that they can be accessed effectively through contextual metadata.
Eventually multiple types of data can be linked together in ways similar to those used in IMLS and NEH funded, ECAI Central projects on contextualizing cultural information. We can begin now to build the community of scholars to create this vision.