Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty (DGSD)

http://songgis.ucmercedlibrary.info/

02 Jul 2010

Library, University of California, Merced, CA, USA.

Supplied note:
"The DGSD is a MySQL database that records the 3,828 units that existed at any time in the administrative hierarchy of China's Song dynasty (960-1276 CE); along with attributes such as population, civil and military ranks, and locations of centers of state industry. All of the entities are spatially referenced, and all events of spatial change (establishment, abolition, promotion, and demotion of jurisdictions) are recorded and abolition, promotion, and demotion of jurisdictions) are recorded and temporally referenced. The database, and shapefiles derived from it, are freely available for download and use under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike terms.
Please contact me or co-author Elijah Meeks (emeeks--at--stanford.edu) if you have any questions or feedback about the DGSD.
Best, Ruth Mostern."

Self-description:
"In 1958, Sinologist Hope Wright published a work entitled An Alphabetical List of Geographical Names in Sung China. Originally published in Paris by the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and reprinted as a second-generation photocopy in 1992 by the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies [http://www.humanities.uci.edu/eastasian/SungYuan/JSYS/index.htm], the Alphabetical List is now out of print.
Wright's compilation is the most comprehensive print source for Song geography in any language. The Digital Gazetteer of Song Dynasty China (DGSD) is a MySQL database derived primarily from the Alphabetical List.
The Alphabetical List is an index to every jurisdiction in the Song (960-1276) spatial administrative hierarchy named in one or more of the following three Song texts: the Song History (Song shi) Geography Monograph, the 980 Records of the Universal Realm in the Taiping Era (Taiping huanyu ji), and the 1085 Treatise on the Nine Territories in the Yuanfeng Reign (Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi)."

Site contents:
* Overview;
* Data (Documentation, Shapefiles, SQL Database, Access Database, Terms of Use);
* Data Structure (Entities, Historical Instances, Point Location, Attributes);
* Data Types (Attribute Types, Change Types, Feature Types, Rank Types, Source Types );
* Methodology (Example of Ningyuan) ["The DGSD attempts to reconcile historical ambiguities that Hope Wright, other authors of reference works -- and indeed Song bureaucrats and authors themselves -- were often able to elide."];
* Visualization (Graphs, Maps);
* RSS Feed;
* [Links] (# China Historical GIS (Harvard) [http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/], # Chinese Civilization in Time and Space (Academica Sinica) [http://ccts.ascc.net/]).

URL http://songgis.ucmercedlibrary.info/

Internet Archive (web.archive.org) [the site was not archived at the time of this abstract]

Link reported by: Ruth Mostern (rmostern--at--ucmerced.edu), h-asia--at--h-net.msu.edu

* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]:
Study
* Publisher [academic - business - government - library/museum - NGO - other]:
Library
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]:
Essential
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000
- under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 30

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Please note that the above details were correct on the day of their publication. To suggest an update, please email the site's editor at tmciolek@ciolek.com

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