This dataset collects the slides that were presented at the Cultural Landscapes in Emerging Digital Scholarship: The Search of Conceptual and Computational Frameworks panel at DH2022 (Digital Humanities 2022: RESPONDING TO ASIAN DIVERSITY) in July 2022.
The following Panel Description was written by Oliver Streiter and Tyng-Ruey Chuang. It was submitted to the DH2022 program committee for consideration on 2021-12-11. The panel proposal was accepted on 2022-03-15.
This collection includes the five sets of presentation slides that were delivered online in a virtual session on 2022-07-27. It also includes an overview slideset prepared by Oliver Streiter, as well as the entire panel abstract included in the DH2022 Book of Abstracts. The panel abstract, marked up in TEI, can also be found on GitHub.
Cultural Landscapes in Emerging Digital Scholarship: The Search of Conceptual and Computational Frameworks
(Panel Description by Oliver Streiter and Tyng-Ruey Chuang)
We define cultural landscapes as landscapes created or modified by human societies, as landscapes of historical or archaeological importance, or as landscapes chosen for an economic, spiritual, sanctuary, commemorative or other cultural function. These landscapes are, due to their size, their internal and external heterogenity, and the process of continuous transformation, a research area that has been under-investigated in digital humanities.
In this panel we thus ask three fundamental questions. First, how can cultural landscapes be described, documented, analyzed, managed and preserved, either digitally, or through digital technologies in situ, cf. Chen and Feng (2020). Second, how can individual research or documentation efforts, conceptually or computationally, be connected to gain more holistic views of the landscape? Finally, how GIS-inspired horizontal layers can be vertically connected through linguistic or cultural descriptors?
Many aspects of cultural landscapes are complex and thus difficult to capture, e.g. in GIS-like models. These are, among others, calendric, geomantic, spiritual, and commemorative meanings of landscapes. These meanings may reside in specific geographic relations, e.g. the fengshui of a house, or outside the landscape, e.g. in the collective memory of a community. Where cultural practices, such as daily routines, evolve in a landscape, the calendar, the timing, and the pattern of recurrence of the practices are constitutional to practices and landscapes. Visual, olfactory, acoustic (Kopij and Pilch 2019, Manzetti 2019, Đorđević and Novković 2019), geomantic and climatic features of a landscape, in addition, require the adoption of multiple points of view for their spatial representation, e.g. wind strength as a function of time and place. A layered representation thus seems like a simplified surrogate, where e.g. a climatic function with parameters derived from multiple layers would be more adequate.
Cultural landscapes evolve in time. They can't be frozen, archived or stored in a museum and are vulnerable to disturbance and even destruction. In addition, cultural landscapes are experienced through time by a multiple of peoples in different dimensions and different research traditions with different expertise. The repeated efforts in producing documentation and data about them can span centuries, cf. Posluschny and Beusing (2019), and thus pose a real challenge in creating unified views. After all, each linking of independently produced layers relies on subjective interpretation and should not be hard-coded in the data.
A necessary but not sufficient condition for the success of the layered approach is thus the availability of shared indices and descriptors. But even if found and formulated, they can at best demonstrate spatial correlations, but not causal or cultural relations, which cannot be induced from correlations alone. Modular layers and their horizontal projections alone might thus produce only surface forms of holistic views. Yet, there are few alternatives in theory and practice as of now to represent deep structures and meanings. This panel thus proposes to bring forward ongoing works in documenting and researching cultural landscapes in East Asia by a diverse group of researchers, so as to present different approaches to cultural landscapes in digital scholarship.
The titles of the presentations are the following:
- The Role of Cognitive Grammars in Documenting Cultural Landscapes: Linking, mapping and interpretation -- Oliver Streiter
- Beyond GIS: Trying to make sense of Penghu cultural landscapes -- Hanna Yaqing Zhan
- Historical Landscape In the Context of Ancient Shrines -- Shoichiro HARA
- Digital Linkage of Local Knowledge: The Implementation of and Some Thoughts about the Taiwanese Religion and Folk Culture Platform (TRFC) -- Ying-Fa Hung and Jr-Jie Jang (Presented by Tyng-Ruey Chuang)
- Documenting Cultural Landscapes: Tools and Issues for Collaboration Across Boundaries -- Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Cheng-Jen Lee, Yu-Chia Monica Mu, Chia-Hsun Ally Wang, and Yu-Huang Wang
