“Collaborative, Gazetteer-Based Approaches to the Religious Atlas of China and the Himalayas Project”
Ruth Mostern, University of California, Berkeley, and Susan Stone, University of California, Berkeley

At the beginning of this year, ECAI launched a three-year effort to develop a Religious Atlas of China and the Himalayas. The framework of the Atlas is a cultural and historical gazetteer. It includes information about the locations of institutions and sacred sites, the travel routes of pilgrims, and the boundaries of historical religious kingdoms. Additional databases may be linked to the gazetteer, such as biographies of religious practitioners, bibliographies of texts produced at particular religious sites, and databases of images. The Atlas is a collaborative project. Content is being developed by specialists in geography, and by specialists in the religions of China and Tibet; not only Buddhism and Daoism, but Islam, Christianity, and other practices as well. This talk will introduce the work that has been done on the Atlas to date. It will also introduce various visions for incorporating and linking the developments by various collaborators. Each vision will be evaluated in terms of its implications for the steps required to pursue it, and ultimately, for the user scenarios that it promises to support.