ECAI ePublication Program

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) is a UC Berkeley-based global consortium of humanities scholars and information technology researchers. The ECAI community is creating a digital library for history and culture with a time-enabled map-based interface. ECAI is collaborating with the California Digital Library's eScholarship program to develop infrastructure, standards, content, and tools to support a new model for interdisciplinary scholarly communication. The ECAI methodology allows resources from around the world to be shared and analyzed using the universal categories of time and space.

An Infrastructure for Scholarly Collaboration

In collaboration with the TimeMap Project of the University of Sydney Archaeological Computing Laboratory, ECAI has developed query tools and a time-enabled map interface linked to a clearinghouse of cultural and historical resources. The ECAI resources, located on web, database, and GIS servers throughout the world, are all registered in the ECAI Metadata Clearinghouse. They include temporal and spatial information as well as other information about culture and history. Unique ECAI-designed structural metadata allows each dataset to be visualized in the form of elements on the time-enabled map interface. Users can select any number of datasets in the clearinghouse to create customized, dynamic maps which animate temporal change and allow for direct navigation to web-linked resources.

The clearinghouse search and map viewer are available in both a web-based version and as a robust desktop client. The client also includes metadata authoring and map registration tools.

ePublication

In order to showcase examples of multimedia, map-based scholarship produced using the ECAI methodology, ECAI and CDL eScholarship are collaborating on ECAI's ePublication series. ECAI ePublications are intended to meet the highest standards of documentation for their disciplines. They are thoroughly peer reviewed and include a text that presents a hypothesis and provides a literature review. The ECAI ePublication program is a groundbreaking experiment in the humanities for the digital age. More than simply conventional scholarship in a digital medium, these ePublications are both distributed and interactive.

• Distributed: ECAI epublications are assembled from resources in the ECAI clearinghouse that reside on servers around the world. Each server that delivers a part of the epublication is reviewed for stability and longevity.
• Interactive: ECAI epublications utilize the ECAI TimeMap methodology. This means that "readers" can customize cartography, filter for time and space, add additional resources, build animations, and navigate from the map interface to web sites and web applications.

ECAI and CDL guarantee persistent access to the ePublications in this series. Each publication receives an external peer review, an internal editorial board review, a technical review, and a persistence review.