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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 53| October 2001
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative Conference: Sydney
Nine years ago a small group of researchers in the United States of America, interested in publishing the results of their work in a digital map format, along with images and text, formed the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI).
The group now has a worldwide following and hosts an annual international conference. This year it was held at the University of Sydney, 1213 June, with the theme of e-Publishing and Knowledge Management for the Humanities.
Around 100 delegates drawn from the United Kingdom, Asia, the United States and Australia heard ECAI director, Lewis Lancaster, open the conference and set the theme by stating that digital data needs not only to be persistent but needs to be of high quality, achieved by peer review.
The first day focused on issues relating to e-Scholarship and knowledge management followed by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the Web. Catherine Cardee of the California Digital Library stressed the need for standardised metadata and data sets to allow the exchange of data. Karen Kemp of the University of Redlands addressed the interaction between the humanities and GIS. While the former documents the human record through time by studying historic documents and cultural objects, GIS demonstrates the physical impact of places and regions on the structure of human society.
Thirteen papers were presented during the afternoon under the banner of GIS, databases and the web. Susan Whitfield and Colin Chinnery, two members of the International Dunhuang project, sponsored by the British Library, addressed a number of concerns relating to their project. There is concern at the growing incidence of digitisation at the expense of traditional resources, whether in libraries or museums and the economic and resource costs involved in such projects. Digitisation should be seen as aiding scholarly research and encouraging the development of specialist staff. Digital maps have not only been developed to interface with photographic images of the objects in the project but also to locate information distributed over a 20 square mile area. More detailed information on the project can be found at: http://idp.bl.uk
James Nye, University of Chicago, and John Falconer, British Library, discussed their joint collaborative project, titled Images of India, which began 15 years ago. An archive of over a quarter of a million photographic images relating to India between 1850 and 1947 has now been linked to a detailed text database and biographical dictionary and is currently being mounted on the Web. Geographic coordinates will also be added to the data. The linkages and coordinates will allow researchers more precise access to the material than previously available. Test pages of the project may be found at: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/images/index.html
Andrew Wilson, Sydney University, provided another perspective in outlining his Sydney TimeMap project, begun in 1998. In conjunction with the Museum of Sydney, State Records NSW and ESRI he has developed an interactive timeline to present the history of Sydney. Maps and pictorial images have been integrated and in time will include historical data sets, and once geographic coordinates have been assigned can then be loaded into a GIS. This will allow three-dimensional modelling which can then be utilised in archaeological and historical studies of the city. The model will be available in a new gallery being constructed at the Museum of Sydney. Details of the project may be found at: www.timemap.net
The second day featured a series of concurrent sessions focusing on a variety of projects covering South Asia, gazetteers, metadata and interoperability, research issues, data collection and visualisation of data over the Web. Ruth Mostern, University of California discussed the ECAI gazetteer research project and emphasised the need for validation of standards, enhancement and the development of providing a centralised or networked gazetteer. A comprehensive and flexible gazetteer standard is crucial to the success and long-term development of the ECAI projects for two main reasons. Gazetteers allow multiple versions of placenames to be linked to one another and with the geographic coordinates of that place. Accurate and precise searches can be conducted and related information can be accurately located. Gazetteers can also be linked to the GIS model and allow scholars to create maps without determining the geographic coordinates.
Michael Furlough, University of Virginia Library, demonstrated the complexities associated with Asian gazetteers in outlining his work on the TibetanHimalayan digital gazetteer. This proposed gazetteer also includes descriptive data. Jianxiong Ge, Fudan University, expressed similar problems with Chinese placenames where time, hierarchy and subordination together with the identification of placenames with the same characters or same location need to be taken into account.
As a complete contrast a paper relating to metadata and interoperability by Chris Blackall of the Australian National University, provided a challenging discussion on interoperability, emphasising the need for local agreements in metadata standards and schema and a removal of many of the present barriers.
In the research issues session, Vladimiro Valerio, University of Venice, provided a stunning demonstration of his newly developed database of early Italian atlases, many from his own collection, which have been fully scanned with supporting metadata. The facility to view several different editions of a work at once was a particular feature of his development, in addition to the high quality achieved in his scanning.
Within data collection, Larry Crissmann, Griffith University demonstrated his development work in digitising the Language Atlas of China, originally published in hardcopy in 1988. Issues involved with creating GIS versions of paper maps were illustrated along with the advantages of the former over the latter.
Finally, in the visualisation session, Renato Iannella, IPR Systems, provided one of the challenging papers of the conference by addressing issues concerned with Digital Rights Management (DRM). Defined as the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of all rights issues the trend in DRM is towards the creation of a life cycle, where payment is made for usage, not possession. Standards under development, such as OpenBook Forum, were demonstrated including their ability to assist web users and content providers.
The conference was stimulating and clearly demonstrated some exciting
research and applications combining both the sciences and humanities
through advanced digital technologies.
Maura OConnor
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au