Developing the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform

Responding to the trend that humanities research is making greater use of quantitative spatiotemporal analysis and visualization, XU Yongming discusses the matter of developing the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform. Xu and his team developed an academic map publishing platform (AMAP) with the aim of supporting the digital humanities from a Chinese perspective. In compiling materials mined from China’s historical records, AMAP attempts to reconstruct the geographical distribution of entities including people, activities, and events, using places to connect these historical objects through time. This project marks the beginning of the development of a comprehensive database and visualization system to support humanities scholarship in China, and aims to facilitate the accumulation of spatiotemporal datasets, support multi-faceted queries, and provide integrated visualization tools. The software itself is built on Harvard’s WorldMap codebase, with enhancements which include improved support for Asian projections, support for Chinese encodings, the ability to handle long text attributes, feature level search, and mobile application support. The goal of AMAP is to make Chinese historical data more accessible, while cultivating collaborative open source software development.