Page 114 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

114 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

1 Research on present situation

1.1 The research and application of modern historical geography in humanities

Modern historical geography is an interdisciplinary filed integrating history, geography and modern
information technology, and has given birth to new research frontiers with the rapid development
of GIS technology. Wang Xiaoguang believed that the frontiers and typical applications of
international DH research at present include GIS based on historical geographic visualization
in the history area (Wang, 2010). In fact, the application of GIS based on historical geographic
visualization in DH is far more than that of history. From 2009 to 2016, the Spatially Integrated
Humanities and Social Sciences Forum which brought together domestic and foreign experts and
scholars from geography, history, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, information technology
and other fields has been held for 8 years in succession. The Spatially Integrated Humanities and
Social Sciences has become a hot spot and frontier in Humanities and Social Sciences (Lin, J.
Zhang, Yang, & J. Liu, 2010).
GIS technology has rejuvenated modern historical geography, which is manifested in the
construction of a series of large-scale historical geographic information systems (Pan, Sun, Man,
2012). In 2001, the Center for Historical Geographical Studies of Fudan University launched the
China Historical Geographic Information System Project and established the Chinese Historical
Geographic Information System (CHGIS) (Ge, 2002). Academia Sinica released Chinese
Civilization in Time and Space (CCTS) and Taiwan History and Culture in Time and Space
(THCTS) (Liao & Fan, 2012) and these two platforms have become noticeable achievements that
combined Chinese modern historical geography with humanities. The common feature of these
platforms lies in that they both mark the historical geography data, extract and organize structured
data simultaneously on the basis of integrating digital map images.
These platforms provide support to the humanities research projects of specific subjects and
relevant scholars with digital map images, structured historical geography data, and GIS tools.
The construction of these two systems represents the development trend of Chinese historical
geographic information system from the map image database to the data support platform.
In addition to browsing, query and download functions, the support platforms mentioned above
provide professional historical geography data download and application program interfaces
mainly to professionals in historical geography, humanities and social science researchers who
know certain knowledge of computer technology as well as application system developers. Xu
Yongming, a humanities researcher of technical literacy, utilized the historical geography data of
CHGIS and CBDBT, the social relation data and GIS tools to visually demonstrate the geographic
distribution of Tang Xianzu’s social relationships. His study contributed to the directly and
orderly presentation of the data which used to be largely distributed in literature (Xu, 2016). This
is a typical case of the application of historical geographic information support platform such as