Konrad’s post on the GIS dataset below is well worth looking at, as this is a very cool dataset.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I saw Peter Bol give a presentation at AAS <\/a>(which has been getting some attention<\/a>) in panel 161 Mapping Chinese Modernity: Industrial Technology and the Question of Space in Modern China (1850-1950). Bol was brought in because no panel on modern technology is complete without a Song intellectual historian1<\/a><\/sup> and because he is one of the main movers behind the China GIS project. He showed us a set of maps that proved that the Chinese railways did not really change the pattern of economic development in China that much because they mostly followed existing transport routes.2<\/a><\/sup> What made his point really interesting is that he was able to illustrate it with maps that he had made up in “a few minutes” using the GIS data. I suspect that easily available GIS data will change a lot of things in the world of scholarship. One example is Google Books, which now automatically generates<\/a> a map which shows all the places mentioned in any given book.\u00a0 Any suggestions for other cool things that cheap, convenient GIS data will make available to us in the future?<\/p>\n his joke, not mine ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li> I’m actually not sure how good this is as a point, as I am pretty sure that railways always follow existing trade routes, since that is where the cargo and passengers want to go. I assume I get this bit of knowledge from Cronon Nature’s Metropolis<\/em> since it is the only train book I know at all well. ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Konrad’s post on the GIS dataset below is well worth looking at, as this is a very cool dataset.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,113,119,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-databases","category-english","category-historiography"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-43","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4962,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/4962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}