The Electronic Cultural Atlas initiative, based at University of California, Berkeley, is an international consortium of scholars developing electronic and web-based materials relating to cultural (primarily historical) information, such as texts, art, artefacts and sites, with the aim of making this information available across the WWW or through specific products such as CD-ROMs.
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative is a collaborative project, which will combine global mapping, imagery, and texts. ECAI provides scholars and other users with a research resource based on digital technology which can present complex combinations of data from multiple disciplines visually and immediately.
ECAI researchers are being challenged to conceive strategies combining mapping and graphics as well as text in order to present data, which might otherwise be limited to written format. The dual mission of the project is to continuously expand the scope of affiliated databases to encompass the many regions and cultures of the world, varied disciplines, and multiple historical periods, while maintaining a high standard of academic research excellence.
ECAI is a project developed from and for academic research. Participating scholars are asked to present their data in an innovative fashion. While each of the researchers in the atlas project works within his or her specialization, researchers can reach beyond boundaries to compare well researched local data with similar material prepared by a colleague in a different region or discipline. ECAI will present the data of many researchers in a format which allows the viewer to combine and compare displayed data. With the ability to range over an expanded region for any particular cultural feature, or juxtapose multiple layers of mapped cultural features, patterns hitherto obscured may emerge.
For more information, please visit the ECAI website at www.ecai.org.
