CGA at Harvard University, including operational model, achievements, and perspectives.
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CGA at Harvard University, including operational model, achievements, and perspectives.
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From a historian’s perspective, the use of GIScience and technology in the study of history holds the promise of an integration of historical and geographic modes of analysis. The national geographic information systems (GIS) that provide extensive coverage of changes in administrative structures over time provide important support for GIS-enabled historiography. Other parts of the cyberinfrastructure necessary to support collaborative research in a digital environment are now beginning to emerge, but a world-historical gazetteer, an essential tool for linking historical data to mapped places, has yet to be developed.
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Guest lecture and hands on lab “Geo-referencing topographic maps and digitizing” for the Harvard Graduate School of Design class “Design and Disaster Development”
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This study explores an innovative approach in teaching operational GIS to students who have taken only one introductory GIS course. It brings real world cases into university classrooms and exposes students to practical solutions of multiple scenarios. In the course of 15 weeks, students learn the complete project cycle from problem definition, data review, project planning, to step-by-step operations, including data modeling, procedures automation, visualization, presentation and reporting. The class forms teams to solve network logistic routing for an emergency relief operation, design a geodatabase for a municipal GIS department, and perform 3D modeling for a campus solar radiation analysis.
The design of the course allows students to learn the skills needed for solving all three cases in class, while focusing on one of the cases for hands-on work in lab hours and take-home assignments. The combination of lectures, demos, student presentations and class discussions provides an engaging environment for all students. Guest lecturers from the case sponsoring organizations bring real world experience and scenarios into the classroom, enriching students’understanding of the problems and making sure that the classroom solutions are indeed operationally sound. Such a course becomes the students’ training ground and the case sponsoring organizations’problem solving test bed.
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WorldMap is a web-based, map-centric data exploration system built on open-source geospatial technology at Harvard University. It is designed to serve collaborative research and teaching, but is also accessible to the general public. This article explains WorldMap’s basic functions through several historical research projects, demonstrating its flexible scale (from neighborhood to continent) and diverse research themes (social, political, economic, cultural, infrastructural, etc.).
Also shared in this article are our experiences in handling technical and institutional challenges during system development, such as synchronization of software components being developed by multiple organizations; juggling competing priorities for serving individual requests and developing a system that will enable users to support themselves; balancing promotion of the system usage with constraints on infrastructure investment; harnessing volunteered geographic information while managing data quality; as well as protecting copyrights, preserving permanent links and citations, and providing long-term archiving.
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In this paper, I propose a new methodology for analysing landscape drawing methods using a GIS. The subject of my analysis is the genre of Japanese screen paintings known as rakuchu rakugai zu ¯ , created between the 16th and 18th centuries. Rakuchu rakugai zu ¯ provide bird’s-eye views of the then-capital city of Kyoto, including buildings, natural features, and human activities. The methodology introduced here uses GIS spatial analysis functions to scan the painting surface onto a survey coordinate grid based on the relative positions of landmarks in the painting. The analytic sequence is as follows: (1) derive coordinate values for landmarks both on the painting and on a survey coordinate grid; (2) generate a link table from these two point-data sets; (3) use the projective transformation and rubber sheeting techniques to project the painting surface onto the survey coordinate grid; and (4) project the areas of the rubber sheet-derived polygons onto the painting. This process gives visual representation to differences between real space and the depicted space. Results show that rakuchu rakugai zu ¯ painted in the seventeenth century
and later distorted real space more than those painted in the sixteenth century, indicating a decrease in adherence to conventional perspective-based painting.
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