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Shared Heritage: Making (Map)Spaces for Cultural Exchange

Caverlee Cary and Xing Liu
University of California, Berkeley

The Southeast Asia Digital Cultural Atlas, an affiliated project of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, will provide Southeast Asia data to the Digital Silk Road project sponsored by the National Institute of Informatics. At the Geographic Information Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley, researchers collect datasets developed by scholars and museum professionals and integrate these data using the customized GIS “TimeMap.” The cultural data will be integrated with environmental GIS data and change-over-time historical data components of the project. The initial demonstration project developed by ECAI Southeast Asia collaborators brought together a range of data types as a proof of concept. In phase two, the focus is trade routes data from the premodern era, an initial supplement for the Eurasian trade routes being developed for the DSR project. The project is an exemplar of GIS for the humanities and ECAI’s approach to technologically-enabled collaboration.