Exploring Historical Australian Expeditions with Time-Layered Cultural Maps

Abstract

The Australian Time Layered Cultural Map platform was created to help digital humanities scholars investigate how online geospatial tools could provide exemplars to their humanities colleagues on how historical collections and cultural data could be extended and re-examined with geospatial tools. The project discussed here investigated how Recogito/TMT could effectively extract spatial and temporal data from pure text-based historical information and generate time-layered interactive maps of that spatio-temporal data using accessible and user-friendly software. The target audience was humanities scholars relatively new to geospatial technologies and relevant programming systems. The interactive maps were created with two free, open-source web applications and one commercial GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping application. The relative pros and cons of each application are discussed. This paper also investigates simple workflows for extracting spatiotemporal data into RDF (Resource Description Framework) format to be used as Linked Open Data.

3D WebGIS for Ephemeral Architecture Documentation and Studies in the Humanities

“…A WebGIS is used not only for data archiving, visualization, queries, and downloads but also for generating analysis maps-such as density maps and statistical data-allowing the retrieval of, for instance, the distribution of historical images for the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway [28]. Relationships between historical events, their locations, and people can be observed over time, such as the influence played by an important Chinese politician across China [29] or the Australian places visited by the explorer Sir Joh Forrest over the 19th century [30]. In [31], a WebGIS was applied to research the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, connecting religious sites with archival and historical sources.…”