Digital Humanities and GIS for Chinese Architecture : A Methodological Experiment

Abstract

"The relational complexity of urban and rural landscapes in space and in time. The development of historical geographical information systems (HGIS) and other methods from the digital humanities have revolutionised historical research on cultural landscapes. Additionally, the opening up of increasingly diverse collections of source material, often incomplete and difficult to interpret, has led to methodologically innovative experiments. One of today’s major challenges, however, concerns the concepts and tools to be deployed for mapping processes of transformation—that is, interpreting and imagining the relational complexity of urban and rural landscapes, both in space and in time, at micro- and macro-scale. Mapping Landscapes in Transformation gathers experts from different disciplines, active in the fields of historical geography, urban and landscape history, archaeology and heritage conservation. They are specialised in a wide variety of space-time contexts, including regions within Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and periods from antiquity to the 21st century."

How can one use a non-architectural source to build a new history of architecture? The study makes use of a corpus of Chinese local gazetteers (Difangzhi, lit. ‘local history’) to take up the methodological challenge. The source comprises 3,999 volumes dating from the tenth to the twentieth centuries covering all the populated area of China, and has been facilitated with a digital infrastructure. This chapter is structured as follows: Sections I and II question some unacknowledged fractures and bias in the established histories of Chinese architecture, and open the issues in context. In Sections III and IV, the chapter proposes a new strategic approach to Chinese architecture with original questions and hypothesis. Section V elucidates how the new data were extracted, particularly the methods used in this study for mining and processing large-scale data thanks to digital humanities and geographic information system (GIS). Sections VI and VII report a ground-breaking result on Chinese architecture.