Abstract:
A focus on Cultural Atlases has enabled ECAI to be inter-disciplinary and incorporate a wide variety of technologies from its inception. The phenomenon of convergence is creating new interrelationships between disciplinary approaches, practitioners and technologies. Spatio-temporal information is now incorporated into many research, learning and public information systems. This along with the growing volume of networked data creates many opportunities for enhanced methods of visualization, analysis and data integration. In this workshop we will be exploring the potential for new insights with convergence of information in interactive systems. Presentations will explore these trends through updates on recent work and provide a venue for discussing future possibilities.
9:30 – 10:30 – Big Tent Digital Humanities: New Possibilities for Visualization, Information Management Tools and Scholarly Practice
Jeanette Zerneke
ECAI, UC Berkeley
Visualization, Convergence, and Cultural Atlases
In developing Cultural Atlases and working with visualization of spatio-temporal data we have learned that one effect of the visualizations is to change people’s perception of the underlying information, to provide insight. There is an interrelationship between the visualization and the research and learning process. The visualization drives users to ask new questions, collect new data and make more complex visualizations. In this presentation I will discuss the advantages of the increased availability of digital data and information technologies on development of complex visualizations and their role in our research projects with examples from our work on the ECAI Religious Atlas of China and the Himalaya, The Religious Atlas of Tibet, and the Early California Cultural Atlas.
Michael Buckland
ECAI, UC Berkeley
Authors notes and collaborative editing and translation
The preparation of scholarly editions of historically important texts is important in the humanities, but expensive. A minor change in editorial procedures to allow editors’ working notes available in a collaborative environment increases the return on investment by reducing duplicative work, increasing editorial productivity, making additional resources available to the public, and preserving resources ordinarily lost when funding ends. Scholarly notes are created throughout the Humanities, so a focus on scholarly notes provides a basis for convergence and collaboration among quite diverse constituencies. A project entitled “Editorial Practices and the Web” is examining these issues. http://ecai.org/mellon2010/
10:30 – 11:00 – Break
11:00 – 12:30 – Insights through multi-dimensional research & visualization
Lewis Lancaster
ECAI, UC Berkeley
The Great Circle and Analytic Convergence
Aming Tu
Dharma Drum Buddhist College, DDBC
Chinese Buddhist Tripiṭaka Electronic Text Association, CBETA
The Atlas of Buddhist Pilgrimage, Buddhist Social Network and the Making of Digital Tripiṭaka
For years, we have tried to use the new technology-based information tools, such as information retrieval, Geographic Information System (GIS), Data Base and multimedia technology, combined with metadata, to launch a new era of Buddhist studies and methods. Hence, in this presentation some of the TELDAP/DDBC Buddhist digital projects will be demonstrated to show how we applied these Digital Archives into e-Learning/Teaching. The projects are:
- Digital Database of Buddhist Tripiṭaka Catalogues
- Buddhist Lexicographical Resources
- Social Network Visualization of the Gaoseng zhuan Corpus
- The Chinese Buddhist Tripiṭaka Electronic Text Collection, Taipei Edition etc.
12:30 – 2:00 Lunch
2:00 – 3:30 Session 3: Convergence Infrastructure - Supporting Spatial and Cultural Data
Fan I-chun
GIS Center of the Research Center for Humanities & Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Review of recent projects at Academia Sinica and of the digital atlas interface used for the Religious Atlas of China and the Himalaya
Paul Ell
Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, Queen’s University Belfast
Converging cultural atlas content through spatio-temporal gazetteers: The Digital Exposure of English Place-names (DEEP) project
The value of gazetteers to link electronic content by place-name has long been recognised. Numerous gazetteers and associated web services exist including the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, the Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer, GeoNames, Unlock and more. However currently electronic gazetteers lack the spatial resolution and chronological depth to be of real value in the use of historical datasets. Put simply they tend to exclude smaller places, and do not have comprehensive coverage of historical place-name variants.
A new project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK will address these issues for England. The project, Digital Exposure of English Place-Names (DEEP), will bring about a transformation in digital gazetteer provision in the UK by broadening it from the purely contemporary to the historical. It takes the 80 years of accumulated knowledge of the Survey of English Place Name, produced by the English Place-Name Society (EPNS), into the digital realm. In total more than 4 million place-names are being digitised from cities and towns to streets and fields. The gazetteer will contain multiple variants of modern place-names as attested in thousands of historical sources. Its scope if vast when it is considered that the Getty Thesaurus covering the whole world includes just 1.1 million names. The project, as well as digitising the work of EPNS, examines ways of developing historical gazetteers where suitable analogue sources are not available including harvesting of place-names from existing e-resources and the use of crowdsourcing.
This presentation discusses the development of DEEP and illustrates the value of relating content by location through an examination of the Vision of Britain Through Time Project, a resource which it is intended will use the DEEP gazetteer.
15:30 – 16:00 – Break
16:00 – 17:30 –Interactive Spatio-temporal Systems
Andreas Kunz
Institute of European History, Mainz, Germany
Pilgrimage Shrines in Central Europe c. 1500. A Project Update
This paper/presentation will focus on spatial and temporal information relating to about one thousand pilgrimage shrines in Germany - one of the important religious landscapes of medieval/early modern Europe - collected by Lionel Rothkrug in the 1970s. The spatial dimension of Rothkrug's data was originally visualized in form of a large-size map, which he included within his book. Later on, in 2001, this data was digitized by ECAI in Berkeley and a first GIS-Version was prepared at that time. About a year ago the data was passed on to Mainz to be checked for inclusion within the "Digital Atlas of Europe since 1500". I will present an update on what we have done with the data, both in terms of converting it into an interactive spatio-temporal knowledge system as well as using it for a series of thematic maps to be included in our European Atlas.
David Blundell
National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Interactive Mapping of Austronesia - From Databases to Integrated Sites |
