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Paul S. Ell Chair

Lewis Lancaster, "The Role of ECAI in the Humanities and Social Sciences"

The long term goal of ECAI is to improve the creation, access, preservation and use of digital resources pertaining to art, culture and history that will invigorate teaching, research and service in a way that transcends any single discipline or approach. The work of ECAI is directed toward the integration of information technology research with humanities teaching and scholarship; providing expertise and training for faculty and graduate students in the humanities, while suggesting new research and development challenges for librarians, graduate students and faculty in information technology fields.

The ECAI strategies and technologies use the categories of time and space to discover, organize, integrate, visualize and use digital cultural resources. Time and space are inclusive organizing principles that offer scholars, teachers, students and others the chance to work simultaneously with content from around the world regardless of differences in format, language and content. A focus on time and space also allows scholars and students in the humanities and information technology to take advantage of important emerging analytical approaches and develop new research questions.

Ruth Mostern, "Content, Research, and Publishing in ECAI: New Models for Digital Scholarship and Heritage Preservation"

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) is a global community of technology experts, humanities scholars, and heritage managers dedicated to enhancing digital scholarship and cultural heritage preservation by using time and place for data sharing. In this presentation, I will introduce examples of the range of works that have been created using the ECAI methodology, including datasets, thematic cultural atlases, and web sites incorporating integrated TimeMaps.

I will also introduce ECAI strategies to integrate digital approaches to time and space into the traditional practices of the university: research about standards and practices for cultural heritage computing, electronic publication of exemplary map-based scholarship, and teaching in history, languages, religious studies and related fields.

Jeanette Zerneke, "The ECAI Infrastructure for Data Sharing"

Scholars have developed many methods to collect cultural records (including history, archaeology, religion, ideas, written works, art, architecture, music, and dance), analyze them, store the material objects, and maintain the records of their study. The ECAI vision is to be able to reconnect various multi-media records using a time and place interface to search for online resources, display them, discover relationships, and create dynamic web resources.

To accomplish this vision, ECAI has been developing an information technology architecture and infrastructure to show the potential of a time and space interface. ECAI has created a digital library (clearinghouse) to which scholars from all over the world have contributed resources. The clearinghouse can be searched by either a text or map interface. ECAI's version of the TimeMap software then allows these diverse digital resources, stored on servers around the world, to be combined and viewed on a single interactive map interface which can also show change over time.

The ECAI infrastructure has demonstrated successful linking of multi-media distributed cultural resources. It has also allowed us to identify challenges including maintaining secure access to distributed resources, linking distributed clearinghouses and data catalogs, forging methods of preserving dynamic digital objects, and developing relevant standards for cultural GIS, time and space metadata, and communication protocols.

Ian Johnson, "TimeMap: an interactive, time-enabled web mapping system for Internet datasets registered with ECAI"

I will briefly describe the time-enabled map viewer developed for ECAI and show how datasets registered in the ECAI clearinghouse, and served from web or other servers on the Internet, can be combined with data available from other organisations to create rich interactive time-enabled maps and animations.

I will also outline the tools available for preparing and registering datasets with the clearinghouse, and show how the Windows TimeMap software can be used as a tool for publishing interactive TimeMaps which can be embedded in web pages with a few lines of code.

Caverlee Cary, "Creating a Community and Building an Atlas: Sharing and Visualising Cultural Data for Southeast Asia"

The Southeast Asia Digital Cultural Atlas, affiliated with the ECAI Southeast Asia team, brings together the efforts of a range of collaborators. Data from various fields—archaeology, economics, history to name a very few—and created for very different purposes by individual scholars or at the direction of major institutions, is recontextualized on the map-based interface. The Atlas is a product, but an ever-changing one not only as users selectively display the datasets they require, but also as new data layers are contributed or as existing ones are updated.

Seeking, uniting, and preparing collaborators is a significant part of Atlas development. One mechanism that serves to further the growth of the Atlas on many levels is offering training workshops in ECAI methodology. This presentation will outline the interplay of process and product in the creation of a digital cultural atlas in the Southeast Asian context.