Digital Humanities
Historic GIS
The use of GIS to provide more insight into historical processes has grown into a mature field. In my own work, I focus on the integration of historic environmental with social and political processes, such as the effect of desertification on migration and state formation.
Correlating monsoonal change with ecotone change in North China 6000-3000BP
- Provide ability to display uncertainty
- Easier to document sources
- Map change over time
Animated Historic Processes
That's probably too nice an outfit for a Western Zhou peasant
Called “Velocipedia” in my Bluesky Digital Innovation entry. It comes in two forms, a frame-by-frame version built in Gimp with GAP and a Flash version:
Song Digital Gazetteer
A database of political geography of Song China, built in MySQL, from the Hope Wright Gazetteer of Song China. Georeferenced from Hope Wright’s spatial information and with reference to georeferencing from CH-GIS and Hartwell’s dataset. This database is used in Ruth Mostern’s Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Territorial State in Song China (960-1276 CE), which will be released by Harvard Press.
Changes in prefectures over the Song Dynasty
Vector Graphics
I find something intuitively powerful about the use of vector graphics, and recommend anyone involved with creating digital media to download Inkscape and grow accustomed with creating vector graphics. I use Inkscape in the creation of much of my digital media, including my cowboys and communists in Bughunter, my Zhou peasantry and nobility in Velocipieda, as well as in the creation of data models for presentations and anything else that you might use Visio or Powerpoint for.