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Monday, January 22, 2018

First Collaborative Digital Scholarship Project Launched

The first Digital Scholarship Project in collaboration with Prof Celine Lai of Faculty of Arts has been soft launched together with the Digi... thumbnail 1 summary
    • The first Digital Scholarship Project in collaboration with Prof Celine Lai of Faculty of Arts has been soft launched together with the Digital Scholarship Projects website in early January 2018.

    The project "GIS Mapping and Archaeology of Early China" was collaborated with Prof. Celine Lai of Faculty of Arts in using GIS for mapping archaeological sites embedded with unearthed bronzes details. The data originally in excel files was collected from her doctoral study on the topic and at the initiation of Prof. Lai, dynamic maps are employed to visualise the distribution of the archaeological sites for people who are interested to the topic to further study.

    To enable researchers to make use of the research data of Prof. Lai and to avoid re-inventing the wheel, the project web site also provides downloadable files in three different formats with the full list of information and references on the bronzes and archaeological sites for producing the map.  
    • PDF file of the table for full references and quotes of information
    • Files for visualising the maps and for further analysis:
      • Shapefile for use in GIS software
      • kmz file for use in Google Map / Google Earth
    Please visit the project website: http://dsprojects.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/en/projects/gis-nao/ for these files and more information.  The project will continue as more data are provided by Prof. Lai.

    Apart from this collaborative project, the DS Service Team has also released another small project: Text Data Preparation: A Practice in R using the Sheng Xuanhuai Collection in demonstrating the use of R in preparing data for Chinese text-mining and analysis.  Future Digital Scholarship Projects will all be available in this Digital Scholarship Projects website.


    About Digital Scholarship Service in CUHK Library
    The Digital Scholarship Service Team aims on collaborating with CUHK Faculty members, researchers and postgraduates in facilitating digital scholarship research.  CUHK community are welcome to visit our Digital Scholarship Services website or email us at dslab@lib.cuhk.edu.hk if your are interested to know more.

    Friday, December 23, 2016

    Digital Scholarship: Applications of GIS in Society I

    A geographic information system (or GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geog... thumbnail 1 summary

    • A geographic information system (or GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographical data related to positions on Earth’s surface. GIS can be used in data visualization, network analysis and statistical analysis, and therefore, GIS has become a common buzzard, heavily cited by scholars, city planners and journalists.

    The Rising Trends of Data Visualization through Mapping

    There are various ways of applying GIS in our society, enriching our understanding and imagination of the world order. Besides the traditional statistical graphing, like pie chart and scatter graph, the journalists and social scientists like to use GIS to represent the electoral data in geographical dimensions. The use of GIS could help capture the spatial variation across the nation and enable further analysis of the impacts of different socio-economic variables - a kind of what we now call "infographics".

    Below are some examples of social application of GIS:

    I. Electoral Studies

    The journalists and social scientists would like to apply GIS into Electoral Studies. Surrounding the controversial US presidential in 2016, there has been an influx of election maps analyzing the electoral data with spatial dimension. One interesting work is “How the Electoral Map Would Look If Only [X] Voted” created by Ste Kinney-Fields published on October 31, projecting the election results if only one demographic group voted:

    Source: 2016 US Presidential Electoral Map If Only [X] Voted, http://brilliantmaps.com/if-only-x-voted/

    The CityLab from Atlantic Media has also created an interesting 3-D map specifically charting the broad patterns of the 2016 presidential results across America’s metro areas. Donald Trump performed better with more red on the map, although Hilary Clinton scored big victories in the Boston-New York-Washington Corridor and the border metros:


    Source: Mapping How America's Metro Areas Voted http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/12/mapping-how-americas-metro-areas-voted/508313/ 

    II. Community Research

    Apply mapping techniques with GIS, the social scientists could also explore the socio-spatial ethnic segregation.  Jill Hubley, a Brooklyn web developer, has mapped New York’s languages, ranging from the tongues of African nations to Korean to Yiddish:
    Source: The Ultimate Map of New York's Non-English Languages: http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/11/languages-spoken-in-new-york-city-map/506054/

    III. Art

    It can be very beautiful to visualize data to graphics and the use of GIS can be a medium of such innovative art. Dorothy, the London studio, has published an art map, 'The World Song Map'. The printed names on the creative map are actually music references:
    Source: Every Single Name on This Entrancing Map Is a Music Reference https://www.wired.com/2016/11/every-single-name-entrancing-map-music-reference/


    The above are just some examples in using GIS to visualize non-textual or even textual data in a beautiful way.  In the next post we will introduce some projects done in CUHK.

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