The Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) 2022 Best Poster Award was presented to an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the University of Arizona whose project is called “Regional Religious Systems in Hangzhou China: Illustrating the Confluence of Buddhist Geography and Culture” by Glen Ingram, Mattea Wallace, Philip Stoker, and Jiang Wu.
This project has two components. The digital content is a portion of the larger Buddhist Geographic Information System (BGIS) project. For this poster, the content focused on the Hangzhou region. The main technological part is the framework of Regional Religious Systems, or RRS, which combines methods of spatial humanities, regional studies, and GIS mapping technologies. This poster documents the creation of a digital atlas, or story map, of the distribution of religious sites in Hangzhou. Utilizing GIS modeling, sites historically viewed as "insignificant" can be considered and contribute to the overall understanding of the physical, administrative, cultural, and socio-economic evolution of Hangzhou.
"In addition to the scholarly significance, we found this project an excellent example of interdisciplinary collaboration…between Chinese history and landscape architecture through GIS," noted judges Prof. Jie Hsiang of National Taiwan University and Prof. Ren Hai of University of Arizona. “The map of China is done in the way that resembles a Chinese landscape painting (山水畫),” they remarked, and “the impressive outcome presented in the poster not only demonstrates the excellence of scholarship of all those involved and the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, but also showcases the strength of the RRS framework, which has the potential to accomplish great scholarly work.”
Since 1993, the PNC has been committed to enhancing digital research and interaction among researchers, educators, and professionals around the Pacific Rim nations. The importance and contribution of the PNC has been widely recognized by the digital and information technology community. To learn more about the PNC, please visit the website at https://www.pnclink.org/.