Speakers
Mr
Andrew Howard
(National University of Australia)
Dr
Faridah Mohd. Noor
(University of Malaya)
Description
At the University of Malaya a digital humanities project was conducted to locate and map places of worship built in the Malay Peninsula before 1960. This presentation is part of a major project on constructing a digital cultural atlas featuring the location of mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples that were constructed before the independence of Malaya in 1957. Fieldwork was conducted to obtain and verify GIS information at sites around the states of West Malaysia. Information gathered from document analysis, interviews and oral history formed part of the methodology employed and transferred to a digital map of the Peninsular Malaysia.
The digital map system used in this project is based on the widely used Open Source Leaflet mapping toolkit which supports using a range of publicly available base maps and overlay layers. The mapping component can operate either as a standalone interface or be integrated into other services, can be easily adapted to display a range of information and styled to match the project. Using a simple template for information entry, styled markers are used to represent each site with colour designating the time period.
The coming of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam to the Malay Peninsula has been established to have spread throughout the Malay Archipelago even before the 1st Century. Based on the dates these religious sites were built, we hope to show the pattern of distribution of these places of worship and investigate the direction how these religions spread in the Malay Peninsula based on the mapping of these sites.
Summary
Keywords: Religions, Digital humanities, Malaysia, Cultural heritage, Cultural map, Leaflet
Primary author
Dr
Faridah Mohd. Noor
(University of Malaya)
Co-author
Mr
Andrew Howard
(National University of Australia)
