Computing Place
Computing Place is a research initiative in cultural and historical geography. It asks how the affordances and constraints of environmental settings bear on cultural practices, a less-examined direction in the study of culture and landscape. Investigating this question requires a means of characterizing the environmental setting of any place on Earth in comparable terms, so developing that instrument came first.
The Environmental Dimensions of Place Service (EDOPS) produces structured environmental profiles, or "signatures," for any terrestrial location, drawing environmental variables and basin geometry from the HydroSHEDS project's HydroATLAS datasets, extended with historical climate and land-use reconstructions along with some derived measures. Signatures are generated to order for named settlements, polities, and regions, and returned over their containing or underlying hydrological basins at multiple scales. A Cultural Dimensions of Place (CDOP) component, which will encode cultural dimensions from ethnographic and textual sources, is in early design.
of Place Service (v0.4)
of Place