Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative

ECAI is a part of International and Area Studies at UCB. It is an international association of scholars, librarians, and technicians who are researching ways to create, preserve, and use digital data relating to cultural studies. The research focus is on the ways to
use time and place in digital library environments and in individual scholarly projects. This research agenda includes working with the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, especially that produced by ESRI Corporation in Redlands, California. ECAI has the added dimension of dealing with time as well as space in the construction of cultural data. The current list of affiliates around the world who are engaged in the work has grown to nearly 1000 individuals as well as major institutions such as the British Library, Arts and Humanities Data Service of Great Britain, Academia Sinica, and National Museum of Ethnology of Japan.
During the last year, ECAI has held conferences in Osaka, Japan (340 delegates) and Vienna, Austria (550 delegates). The next international conference will be held in Bangkok in association with NECTEC and the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium. A major workshop is scheduled in Rome in November under the title of "Reconstructing Archaeological
Landscapes in the New Technologies." This is a joint Italy-U.S. project sponsored by the National Center for Research in Rome and by ECAI, Center for Virtual Reality (UCLA), and the Field Museum of Chicago.
One goal is to help scholars make use of digital material in the classroom. At UCB during fall 2002, ECAI staff helped to create classroom presentations on ancient Chinese history, the Silk Road Culture of Central Asia, and digital material for Chinese language courses. Future use of digital materials is being given consideration by a number of faculty and assistance is offered for help in georegistration of material as well as use of the ECAI software TimeMap for display. Plans are being made to work with educational issues at future ECAI conferences being planned for 2004-06 at Berkeley, London, and Japan. The Rome workshop will have one session on the use of Virtual Reality constructions of archaeological sites in classrooms.Meetings are being held with the staff of the ESRI Corporation to determine the nature of tools that scholars need for presentation of digital maps in the classroom. The recent meeting in Vienna was partially funded by Autodesk Ges.m.b.H. of Austria dealing with use of the software for creation of images that can be used
for research and teaching.