ZJU and Harvard launch China's first academic mapping platform

Are you ever curious about the places that TANG Xianzu (1550-1616), a renowned Chinese playwright of the Ming Dynasty, went to in his lifetime? Do you want to catch a glimpse of the traces and doings of CHU Kochen when he served as president of Zhejiang University? Are you interested in acquiring information concerning the characters in The Complete Works of Song, The Complete Works of Yuan and Yuan Poetry?

Tracking the traces of TANG Xianzu

All these will become an easy task with the construction of China’s first comprehensive “academic mapping platform”. Jointly established by ZJU’s Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, the platform was officially brought into operation on March 19.

Geographic information is intimately tied to human activities. For an individual, it includes his or her place of birth and the geographic distribution of his or her social relationship; for a group, it includes its geographic distribution and migration route; for a non-living object, it includes the region and track of its existence, distribution and shift; for a locale, it includes an aggregate body of geographic information regarding people, events and objects in the past. At present, various countries all over the globe are endeavoring to build a diversity of databases through data mining.

Locating the authors of The Complete Works of Yuan

The academic mapping platform aims at providing users with the release of research results about geographic information, visual analysis, and multi-functional query services. Data produced by the platform will greatly enhance future scientific research, government decision-making, and social services.

So far, the platform has produced a series of academic maps regarding The Complete Works of Song, The Complete Works of Yuan, Yuan Poetry, playwrights and female authors in the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912), figures in ancient and modern Zhejiang province, etc. Moreover, the database is expanding.

Professor Peter Bol speaks at the launch ceremony. (Image credit: Chinanews.com)

At the launch ceremony held at ZJU on March 19, Peter K. Bol, Vice Provost for Advances in Learning (VPAL) and the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University, shared Harvard’s experience in constructing databases.

Harvard WorldMap is an online, open source mapping platform developed to lower barriers for scholars who wish to explore, visualize, edit, and publish geospatial information. The system attempts to address the gap between desktop GIS which is generally light on collaboration, and web-based mapping systems which often do not support the inclusion of large datasets.

At ZJU, the platform builds upon the collective efforts of a “Big Data + Academic Mapping” innovative team formed in April 2017. The team is comprised of experts from the School of Humanities, the School of Earth Sciences, and the College of Computer Science and Technology. They have carried out relevant work concerning database development and visual analyses of spatial distributions by integrating an ocean of data related to Chinese history and literature with geographic information.

The team signed a memorandum of understanding with respect to the joint development of the Chinese Academic Mapping Platform at the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis in October 2017.

“We will further optimize the platform and create a batch of influential databases in the next phase,” said Professor XU Yongming, head of the innovative team.