Hello, welcome to visit Shanghai Forum
Withoutsharing the information, scientists cannot figure out the best policies and peoplewill not get together to support policies that are important to the quality oftheir lives. So in terms of protecting environment, sharing information is avery simple but crucial starting point.
Reporter:Wang Xian
Reporter: Could you briefly introduce theGeographic Information System (GIS) and your service center?
Peter K. Bol: Iam interested in the way which we connect history and geography. Historicalanalysis usually concerns change over time, and spatial analysis usuallyconcerns variation through space. Geospatial Analysis is something that isuseful in most fields, both as a technology and as a form of analysis. It can bevariously applied to understand regions, history, climate, warfare, seasons,global oil distribution and so on. Strong visualization is one of its importantadvantages. A picture is worth thousands of words.
One way tounderstand our Center is that, we as a center do not do research, but we helpother people apply spatial analysis in their research. This is a very importantdistinction. You will find visitors, researchers, students, and faculty doingtheir own research in our center, but you will also find GIS analysts, ourfull-time professional staff who have the technical skills to help manydifferent kinds of projects. I also believe in the importance of internationalcollaboration, such as the collaboration with Fudan to create China Historical GeographicInformation System (CHGIS).
Q:You have done many historical projects on China with GIS, what are yourfindings?
Peter K. Bol: Inmy own research on China, I am interested in the ways which administrativesystem of China changes over time: where it changes and where it does notchange. Let’s look at the Lingnan area, namely Guangdong and Guangxi. In the TangDynasty the administrative centers are more developed than the Song Dynasty. Soin fact, from the administration’s point of view, the Lingnan area has declinedfrom Tang to Song. And it is really in Ming that it starts to revive with many administrativecenters.
I am alsointerested in how the political elites are organized, in terms of familydimension and space. Where do people pass the examinations? Where do they live?In the Song Dynasty they live in around three or four different regions but theseregions are not always the same. These clear regional clusters of literatielites do not correspond to population. The representation ofcertain areas in government is based on the nature of their elites, not on theamount of population. So there are densely populous areas which have verylittle success in the examination system, and there are areas with fewer peoplewhich have lots of people represented in the government. This means people fromcertain parts of China had greater political influence than those from otherparts of the country. This may be something we already know. However, we can thenstart to correlate this to other kinds of information. We can look at wherecommercial tax is paid and the spread of Daoxue or Neo-Confucianism (a newintellectual social movement in 12thand 13thcentury),to see how they relate to distribution of elites and examination systemtogether. Dataset from Northern Song (1077) shows some interesting phenomenon:Daoxue is not particularly successful in the most commercial areas, but is successfulin areas which have large numbers of educated literati.
In the case ofnetworks, if we look at where the population stands, we can see that networksof settlements cross administer boundaries and conduct spatial analysis. Networkanalysis is a very interesting approach which I think is getting more and moreattention.
Almost all ofthe above research involves databases, because there are a very large number ofpeople involved. For spatial analysis and network analysis, we use software.
Q:As the Professor of History and the Director of the Center for GeographicAnalysis, what do you think of the boundary between disciplines?
Peter K. Bol: Actually,network analysis comes out of sociology and mathematics. I am a historian forsure, but it seems to me that in the study of history, if we have interestingquestions to ask, then we try to find the best methods to answer the questions.And it certainly true that written books are sources of information for history.Before 2000, I studied history only by reading books, yet this did not help mefully understand other things, such as the landscape, as one of the contextsfor events. If we take the data in the books to know where people live in the landscape,to know how the government administration is organized in the landscape, then webuild many different contexts to understand human activity. Computation makesit possible for us to look at an enormous amount of data at once. Perhaps thisis what traditional historians have been uneasy about.
For instance, supposeI given you 1000 examples of a phenomenon and you discover 30 mistakes. Howimportant is this? My view is that this is well within an acceptable margin oferror. However, for a biographical dictionary or a word dictionary, we demandthat every fact and every word be right. So that is a really importantdifference between a database-based approach and a dictionary-based approach, butpeople often confuse the two. In my work I sometimes use a large amount ofdata, such as the China Biographical Database. For this database, we actuallyread books using computation methods to record data, such as place names, personnames, dates and offices. At the moment, human beings check what the computerdid. I do not think it will meet the expectations of people who want a dictionary.Rather, we offer a more computation-based method. Now it is not yet perfect,but this kind of thing is part of our future. There are many futures. The oldways should continue even as new opportunities are added.
Q:How do you come up the idea of creating WorldMap? What are some of the newdevelopments? Is there any cooperation with China?
Peter K. Bol: WorldMapdepends on the help from all the people who are involved in open-source GIS.Our institution has full-time staff, but we also receive help from many peopleoutside Harvard. It is collaborative. WorldMap started from 2012 and within oneyear, we had attracted around 8,000 users who have created over 2,000 maps, andthe visitors from over 200 countries have reached 350,000. Our goal is tocreate a world map platform.
The real purposeof WorldMap is the promise of the web: everyone benefits when people can sharedata and collaborate. And if you share the data, and I share my data, thensomebody else may come along and have new discoveries, based on putting thedata together. I do the research, and I can share my work with other peoplewhen I finish if I want to. That’s the idea behind WorldMap, and clearly it isa good idea, because many people are doing this.
We hope tocooperate with Professor Peng Xizhe’s group at Fudan, the Social Data ResearchCenter, to visualize spatial data online. Basically we are interested in seeinga Chinese version of WorldMap, which will make easy for people in China to use.We also keep developing new utilities and new applications, like a time series(to be able to look at changes over time), and loading spreadsheet directly intoWorldMap (the best known one is Excel from Microsoft). Thoseare two very important developments; wealso are going to make it possible to comment and rank on people’s work. We of coursemake maps ourselves for teaching.
The idea ofWorldMap is collaboration, sharing, and ease of use. GIS and computertechnology may not be easy for most people to use, but WorldMap is easy to use.
Q:How could WorldMap and GIS contribute to environment and climate issues?
Peter K. Bol: Ifwe want to help people to think about the environment, one of the mosteffective ways is to show them what’s happening, in other words, show them amap. If you want to see the problem of food security, carbon emission or streampolluting, visualize the data and show a map.
For example, to representair pollution, we divide the country into counties. Each county has one or two sensorsthat measure the air and give different readings. There are two ways tosymbolize the data. One will be put a dot on the map showing the density ofpollution with color, which is point-based symbolization. Another will betaking averages of nearby readings and then cover the whole area in differentcolors, which is polygon-based symbolization. The point-based one is truer, becauseit just says that this place has a sensor that has that reading. The polygon-basedone generalizes those sensors to a whole area and creates appearance of acontinuous distribution that may be wrong, but it results in choropleth mapwith strong visualization. In this way, you can depict sky of Beijing bysymbolizing the data of readings.
The environmentis all about information. Better environmental policies developed in the US arebecause people had information, and they could talk about consequences of thatdata. Usually big companies are reluctant to stop pollution because it costsmoney and makes things more expensive. Sometimes, the government, either thelocal or central, are not transparent enough. Without sharing the information,scientists cannot figure out the best policies and people do not get togetherto support policies that are important to the quality of their lives. So interms of protecting environment, sharing information is a very simple butcrucial starting point.
Q:What China could learn from the US in terms of controlling environmentpollution?How shall human beings collaborate in aglobal level to confront environment and climate change?
Peter K. Bol: Themoon in the sky of China is the same moon in the sky of the US, and bothcountries have scientists who are working on environment problems. It dependson how you act and respond to knowledge. I can tell you that if you study hardevery day, you can succeed, but it doesn’t mean you will study hard every day. Again,that’s why information is important. Very few people understand that the waythey live is affected by what happens in the environment.
If we look back,the history of 20thcentury is not very hopeful, is it? For all thereason and knowledge we had, there was a World War I and World War II. Thequestion is what kind of leaders we have now. If they are wise, they will lead usto policies of collaboration. Our job as scholars is to work hard to try to makesure that our leaders act wisely with good information in the way that benefitsour own populations and the world. It's always hard work. There is never a permanentsolution. What else can we do? We do our best.
Q:What can we learn from the history?
Peter K. Bol: Thisis a very interesting question. Last week I interviewed a bunch of studentsfrom Fudan and East China Normal University working on different periods ofChinese history. We said suppose you were talking to one of the leaders aboutwhat the leader should worry about based on your knowledge of Chinese history. Whatwe discover is that history doesn’t necessarily tell us how to solve problemstoday, but it helps us to see the problems. The fact people did in the past,doesn’t mean it’s good or bad, it’s just a truth they did it like that. Itdoesn't mean we have to do like that. The Mongols rode through China, central Asia,and eastern Europe, and massacring people as they went; it does not mean weshould do so. History cannot tell what the right way is. It tells you what youshould worry about. And I believe historians and scholars in China can talkabout what China should worry about.
Q:Technology is regarded as double-edged sword. For example, it helps in the caseof GIS, but it also enslaves and destroys life sometimes. How do you evaluateit?
Peter K. Bol: Ithink technology is a tool. You have to know your purpose. I guess the idea comesfrom Zhuangzi. “We want to control things, but we don't want to be controlledby things.”（“役物，不役于物。”）That was beforetechnology. What he was talking about is people’s desire to own things. Thatwill enslave people, too. Something that does not have very much value, but youlove it so much that you would like to die to keep it. It’s stupid, but peopledo that, right? I don’t think the problem of being enslaved by things is a newproblem; it’s an old one. The way we deal with it is try to be careful of howwe use technology. I don’t think technology is a major factor of pollution. Ifyou mean technology very broadly, industrialization is the one for sure. Thedanger of pollution is global warming, associated with industrialization, like carbonemission, automobile, electricity production and so on.
Introduction
PeterK. Bol: The Charles H. Carswell Professor East Asian Languages andCivilizations at Harvard. Director of the Center for Geographic Analysis atHarvard. His research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites atthe national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He also directsthe China Historical Geographic Information Systems project and ChinaBiographical Database project.
