This workshop will introduce CHMap, an open-access web GIS platform developed by MPIWG and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), to researchers in Chinese and East Asian history and digital humanities. CHMap provides large-scale, geo-referenced land survey maps of China produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as base layers via Web Map Tile Service (WMTS). It allows researchers to integrate image collections from other sources on top of those base layers for exploratory and comparative analyses.

From the last decades of the Qing dynasty to the end of the Republican era in 1949, China’s central and provincial governments, as well as the Japanese Army, conducted geographic surveys across the country and produced maps containing detailed information on topographical and administrative features. As the earliest maps made with modern cartographic techniques in China, they offer a panoramic view of "the last images of imperial China" with broad coverage of the country’s major cities and counties. Over 4,000 of these land survey maps of China were compiled and published by the Japanese publisher Kagaku Shoin between 1986 and 1998. MPIWG’s Department III and SJTU’s Department of History have jointly curated, digitized, and geo-referenced these maps into WMTS layers to create CHMap, which provides them as scalable base layers to be used within and across external GIS platforms and clients.

In addition, CHMap helps researchers to "link visions together" by providing a digital ecosystem to geo-reference and visualize external image collections together with its base layers. Image collections from IIIF servers, CSV and GeoJSON datasets, and other WMTS layers could all be imported into CHMap. For example, we have built a route to display images from Chinese local gazetteers via MPIWG’s LoGaRT, and we will demonstrate how researchers could analyze and compare their images collectively in CHMap.

After this workshop, participants will be able to use CHMap to investigate images together with data of various sources and formats. Besides researchers, we also welcome librarians and tool developers who are interested in GIS- and image-based content integration in order to foster discussion, innovation, and communication across digital humanities.