The HGIS Experience of Drawing Sub-county Unit Boundaries in the Jiangnan Region of Late Imperial China - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 182

Fig. 11.6 The 8 km buffer zone of the cotton cloth textile towns of the Greater Songjiang region
during the Ming period (The points of the circle centers representing the cotton cloth textile towns)
transformed into electronic displays and quantitative data in a modern HGIS (Tam
2012 ). In theory, because the methods used to recreate the Songjiang region's
township boundaries can be applied to every part of China when relevant local
gazetteers are available, it is possible to build a GIS infrastructure for China's
historical geography at a much higher resolution than the prefectural level presently
used by most of the country's HGISs. Moreover, the nature of each local gazetteer
category should be carefully explored to generate ideas and methods for possible
new GIS applications. It is also important to be aware that some GIS applications
are more related to the data collected from certain local gazetteer categories.
For example, because the mode of cotton cloth production in the Songjiang
region involved weaving performed by households residing in the villages sur-
rounding the cotton towns, it was sensible to use the “buffer area” function of
the GIS to create zones around the relevant towns so that the actual area of cotton
cloth production could be identified (Fig. 11.6 ). To recognize the cotton towns, we
consulted category (18) (i.e., market towns) of the local gazetteers in which the
nature and specialties of these towns are mentioned. However, we then faced the
question of how long the length of the buffer zone area's radius should be. As a