Digital texts and GIS: the interrogation and coordinated visualization of classical chinese texts

This paper describes an online interface that allows the concurrent visualization of geographic information drawn from ancient Chinese texts and facilitates the filtering of datasets according to sophisticated time and place queries. The interface is one piece of a larger project at Dharma Drum Buddhist College which aims to visualize the Buddhist Gaoseng Zhuan literature (201C;Biographies of Eminent Monks201D;). It is based on open-source technologies, is as browser- and platform-independent as possible, and demonstrates a very practical solution to the problem of visualizing spacio-temporal information for a wide audience.