The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism

This project undertakes ground breaking Australian research to resolve the fundamental challenges of narrative coherence for museum audiences as they explore digital cultural atlases. Addressing narrative coherence provides a structure for interpretation, as users navigate, explore and creatively reorganise these heterogeneous datasets. As part of this investigation, the project will integrate a unique heritage dataset—the Atlas of Maritime Buddhism (Atlas)—which has accumulated historic evidence for the spread of Buddhism from India to Korea through the seaports of Southeast Asia. Its pan-Asian spatially and temporally enabled sources are significantly diverse in both type and format (e.g. archaeological materials, travellers’ accounts and historic gazetteers to name a few). The aim of the proposed research is to develop a pioneering narrative-driven deep mapping schema, an information visualisation framework for interactively exploring the narrative patterns, processes and phenomena in the Atlas. This schema will investigate narrative coherence through the experimental application of the world's first deep mapping data browser—a navigational interface developed in a 360-degree 3D (omnidirectional) virtual environment.

The Atlas is of great academic importance as it contains evidence that counterbalances prevailing narratives which foreground the overland Silk Road, and neglect the importance of pan-Asian maritime countries and Buddhism entrepreneurship in the expansion of trade from 2nd century BC-12th century AD. Comprising multiple overlapping chronological events, the Atlas supports diverse types of historic evidence from disparate spatial locations represented by approximately 170 generalised information layers. With contributions from researchers around the world, it includes geospatial coordinates, gazetteers for hundreds of sites, images of archaeological sites and artifacts.

Bringing the unique story of maritime Buddhism into the public domain for the first time, this project will have highly visible outcomes in Australian, Chinese and Hong Kong museums. It positions Australia as a leader of digital museological innovation in Asia and worldwide.