Spatiotemporal Tools for Humanities

Shoichiro HARA⁽¹⁾ and Tatsuki Sekino⁽²⁾

⁽¹⁾ Center for Integrated Area Studies, Kyoto University, shara@cias.kyoto-u.ac.jp

⁽²⁾ Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, sekino@chikyu.ac.jp

Area study is an interdisciplinary science between humanities and natural sciences in order to understand a particular area comprehensively by comparing and integrating knowledge across areas and research domains. However, as languages, terminologies, concepts and methods are different from areas and research domains, place and time are the essential attributes to integrate and link information of different resources.

The Humanities GIS Research Group (H-GIS) [http://www.h-gis.org] is an interdisciplinary research group that has been interested in spatiotemporal attributes of resources to integrate data of humanities and to create new knowledge. In the Workshop, we will describe a model and some spatiotemporal tools developed by the H-GIS as follows:

HuMap: HuMap (Humanities Map) is a newly developed free GIS tool that is derived from TimeMap [http://www.timemap.net/index.html]. The innovation of TimeMap is that it can carry out temporal operations, but weakness is that it is rather a viewer than an analysis tool. The latest HuMap is completely different software from TimeMap, and it can carry out visualization operation, spatial operations and temporal operations.

HuTime: HuTime (Humanities Time) is an innovative temporal information tool. In the same way as HuMap overlays and visualizes maps and images by referencing positions, HuTime arranges calendars, documents, graphs, and images by referencing time lines. Users can easily grasp temporal relations and/or patterns of events from different calendars by time.

Spatiotemporal Model: HuMap has rich spatial functions but limited temporal functions, while HuTime has no spatial functions but rich temporal functions. The H-GIS is trying to combine two tools to create a revolutionary tool that can handle time and space attributes simultaneously. A spatiotemporal model is introduced to design the new tool.