Work on TLCMap will commence in 2019 and continue into 2020.
A common aim in humanities mapping is to geolocate collections and archives of images, texts, audio or video files. Many online collection and archive systems already have built in features or plugins to enable this. Our contributions to this area will be:
Heurist is a system for handling complex data, including collections of media associated with relational and linked data. Heurist is available if you do not already store your collection in a web archive management system. TLCMap will ensure mapping compliance and compatibility in Heurist.
Geolocating collections can be a very laborious, monotonous and time intensive process. We aim to provide some tools to make common problems as quick and easy as possible. For example, most systems allow export and import of data as spreadsheets (such as .csv files) - a tools that enables quickly adding coordinates to spreadsheets of data, such as a table of image names with metadata. Reducing such menial tasks which none the less require human judgement from 10 seconds to a few seconds can save time and money. This can make projects that were too expensive feasible.
‘Maps’ come in different forms – songs, dances, hand sketches, lienzos, art, etc which may be stored as images, audio or video. Many humanities requirements involve making connections and associations not only of some media to a place (such as a photograph in a collection) but among points within these media - such as a hand drawn map or a point in a recorded narrative and a modern satellite map, to a map. These associations can be across all kinds of media, not just to a GIS system. For example, an image of an old map might be related to a ships journal and both might be related to a map. Parts of a recording of a story might be connected to points in a painting which might be connected to sections of a line on a map showing the path taken while the story was told. Often interacting with particular kinds of data requires an application of some sort - this may be a simple image viewer that highlights the relevant points, or a complex set of transcriptions, translations, glosses and notes arranged in parallel.
Time Layered Cultural Map is funded by the Australian Research Council, PROJECT ID: LE190100019
