Hyungmin Lee presenting in CHI2012 at Austin, Texas. Photo by Kyle Koh.
JigsawMap

Connecting the Past to the Future - Visualizing and Mapping Textural Cadasters

Hyungmin Lee, Sooyun Lee, Namwook Kim, and Jinwook Seo / 2012

Project Description

Pre-modern artifacts are often important research materials for humanities fields such as history, law, and art. Digitizing such artifacts can significantly increase the scale and extent of humanities research because computerized artifacts can be widely accessible and analyzed in a large scale with powerful computational methods. We have been collaborating with Korea historians to design and implement an interactive visualization tool for visualizing historical textual cadasters and connecting them to more recent hand-drawn geographical maps. Our design will enable researchers in many history-related fields to gain better understanding of the meanings and implications of pre-modern textual cadasters. By linking them to more recent ones, historians can transform historical textual data to graphical map and will learn how they surveyed lands, understand their encoding shceme and trace the changes in land use/ownership. We also expect that our visualization tool will build further interdisciplinary collaborations: geology, anthropology, linguistics, and economic history. There are three main challenges in this project:

  • to generate a visual layout of land pieces from a textual cadasters,
  • to segment each land piece from a hand-drawn graphical map,
  • to design interactions to help users match the layout and the segmented map

Matching Process

Graph Layout Algorithm

Map Segmentation Algorithm

Support

This work was supported by Microsoft Research Asia and National IT Industry Promotion Agency.

Demo

Publication