Developing the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform

Abstract

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.

This essay was originally published in SPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, Volume 8, Issue 12 (December 2019). Funding: This project is funded by Zhejiang University and Harvard University. The platform benefited from other projects contributing to the GeoNode code base, especially the Secondary Cities project funded through NSF #1841403. Acknowledgments: The authors wish to thank all team members who contributed to this project both in system code and in platform content, especially Paolo Corti, Lijun Wang, Yao Liu, and Feng Zhang. Author Contributions: Conceptualization, Xu Yongming, Benjamin Lewis and Weihe Wendy Guan; Data curation, Yongming Xu; Formal analysis, Benjamin Lewis; Funding acquisition, Yongming Xu and Weihe Wendy Guan; Investigation, Benjamin Lewis and Weihe Wendy Guan; Methodology, Yongming Xu and Benjamin Lewis; Project administration, Yongming Xu and Weihe Wendy Guan; Resources, Yongming Xu; Software, Benjamin Lewis; Supervision, Weihe Wendy Guan; Validation, Yongming Xu and Benjamin Lewis; Visualization, Yongming Xu and Benjamin Lewis; Writing—original draft, Yongming Xu, Benjamin Lewis and Weihe Wendy Guan; Writing—review & editing, Yongming Xu, Benjamin Lewis and Weihe Wendy Guan.