TIBETAN CULTURE

Featured student projects from Columbia University

Featured Projects from Tibetan Civilization Coursework at Columbia University

Visualization Project

A mapping visualization project based on locations referenced in biographical texts.

Visualization Project Report

The following is a summary of the steps I took over the course of the visualization project. It will be useful for understanding the final output, and for anyone who wants to pick up where I left off.

Phase I: Location and Significance Extraction

This phase was focused on assembling the foundational data for the project: a list of locations references in the biography summaries along with their significance in the life of the individuals covered.

I read all the selected biography summaries and copied each location mentioned into a table along with its significance. To capture significance quickly but meaningful, I assigned each location one of five significant codes, depending on the role it played in the subjects’ life:

  • (1) Born – Indicates the subject’s birthplace.
  • (2) Study – Indicates a place where the subject studied, typically a monastery and often some distance from home.
  • (3) Work – Indicates a place where the subject worked or made a professional contribution.
  • (4) Influence – Indicates a remote influence on the subject’s life. This term catches a variety of kinds of influences (the referenced geographic origin of a school of thought or idea, the monastery that a master the subject encounters comes from, etc.) The subjects generally do not travel to these locations so locations tagged influence represent intellectual and political exchange rather than physical movement.
  • (5) Travel – Indicates a place that the subject traveled to but generally did not reside permanently at.

Limitations and Issues

Many of the biography summaries were surprisingly light on locations. Most neglected to mention the birthplace of the subject, almost all did not reference the subject’s death location, and many described important activities in the subjects’ life (studying under a master, erecting a temple, etc.) without specifying where the event took place. On several occasions, the summaries noted that the subject went to meditate in solitude in “the mountains” or “the wilderness,” which are not possible to associate with a specific location.

I also resolved a few minor technical issues at this stage. Several of the files covered the same subject (i.e. Milarepa) so I consolidated those entries and two of the summaries didn’t mention any locations at all so I omitted those. Several files also summarized biographies with multiple subject so I gave each one its own entry. I omitted references to locations in past lives from the visualized data set, as well as to non-physical locations.

Appendix I lists the files covered by this analysis.

Phase II: Geocoding the Locations

This phase was focusing on associated as many of the extracted locations as possible with latitude/longitude coordinates, in preparation for visualizing the locations on a map. This phase included the following four major steps:

On some occasions, it was necessary to select a reasonable approximation of the coordinates (the town a monastery was in rather than the monastery itself) and to use coordinates for the modern-day successor of the historical location (renamed towns, etc.)

Limitations

However, due to inconsistent spelling of Tibetan place names, limited historical coordinate information, the obscurity of some of the locations referenced (“Horse Tooth White Rock,” “Seng phug cave of the Wang valley,” etc.), and the reality that several of the locations referenced do not exist in the present and so will not appear in the contemporary coordinate sources, it was not possible to confidently assign coordinates to all the locations.

Results

Of the 206 locations extracted from the biography summaries, I was able to correlate 153, or approximately 74%, with latitude and longitude coordinates.

Because these omissions were spread throughout (see Table) the biographies, it was necessary to decide whether to include subjects in the ultimate visualization if some or many of the locations associated with them could not be plotted. I ultimately erred on the side of inclusion and only omitted subjects from the visualization if (1) a large proportion of the locations associated with them were unmappable, (2) the remainder was entirely unrepresentative, or (3) all but one location in the series was unmappable, which would make it impossible to draw a line. Although this means that some plots are not as rich as the originally extracted data suggest, that’s also true more generally of the relationship between biography and summary, which seemed all the more reason to err on the side of inclusion.

Ultimately, of the 37 subjects covered by the summaries, it was necessary to exclude 6 that didn’t meet these criteria. 31 subjects were ultimately included.

Phase III: Visualization/Mapping

This phase was focusing on visualizing the location data in QGIS, an open source geographic information system package.

I assigned a number to each location in one table and then plotted 112 lines illustrating the journey each subject took through a sequence of locations; for example, the route from their birthplace to the monastery they studied in to the places they traveled to. If the subject studied in Lhasa and then traveled to New Delhi, I would create an entry in the line database indicating that a line should connect Lhasa at point 3 to New Delhi at point 5, and then repeated the process for each line.

I generally plotted the sequence of locations traversed by a given subject as a series as a progression of connected lines (born-study-travel-work-travel) with the exception of “influences,” which are connected to the proceeding entry (so influences encountered in the proximity of a period of studying at a location are drawn in connection with that location).

One of the limitations of this approach is that the first entry in the sequence doesn’t have a representation of significance, only each of the following ones. For example, a line drawn between a point indicating birth to a point indicating a place of study would be associated with “study.” As far as I can tell, there’s no ready method that I can use to overcome this limitation.

Another challenge presented by this approach is that the PointConnector plugin I used also truncates the imported data down to the unique ids of each end of the line (excluding the data about the significance of the connection and which subject was associated with it) so I used QGIS’s Join tool to cross-reference the data sets and bring those associations back into the Line layer. I then labeled each line with the subject in question. I also used several cross-table VLOOKUPs to keep the data in sync across data sets.

As a final step, I produced and exported several different versions of the map to illustrate the output at different levels of zoom and in different areas. This is a summary of the maps I output:

Final Maps

Color Code: Born [White], Study [Blue], Work [Green], Influence [Red], Travel [Orange]

  • Significance (Color-Coded) Wide View
  • Significance (Color-Coded) Mid View
  • Significance (Color-Coded) Narrow View I
  • Significance (Color-Coded) Narrow View II
  • Significance No Terrain
  • NoSignificance Mid View
  • NoSignificance Mid View (No Names)

Reflections and Caveats

  • Density of International Interactions Even with a relatively small sample size, I think the map is effective at capturing some of the cosmopolitan interactions of the covered era in Tibetan history. As expected, many of the subjects have extensive travels to and influences from Nepal, India, and Kashmir. But it’s also notable (and expected) that the highest density of study, travel, influence, and travel occur in southern Tibet.
  • Emphasis on Middle of Subjects’ Lives Although they depict a chronological progression of places visited, the lines more accurately capture the middle of most subjects’ lives than their full expanse. This is because, as mentioned previously, it was not possible to visualize the significance of the first point in the sequence, birth location is missing for many subjects (which means that the lines begin with events that are well into their lives), and death location is missing for virtually all subjects. While it is natural to read the lines as capturing the full progression of a life, they’re more accurately read as a schematic snapshot of some significant events and activities. That said, on many occasions, the lines capture the general progression of the subjects’ lives well.

Appendix I

File Names of Summaries Analyzed

  1. A brief biography of Buton Rinchen Drub
  2. Biography of Like An Illusion
  3. Chos Smra ba’i dge slong blo bzang chos kyi rgyal mtshan gyi spyod tshul gsal bar ston pa nor bu’i phreng ba (=Nor bu’i phreng ba)
  4. Delog
  5. Falling Off the Roof of the World- The Autobiography of the Venerable Lama Dudjom Dorjee
  6. Fearless in Tibet; the life of the mystic Tertön Sogyal
  7. Galun Zhuan
  8. Himalayan Hermitess- The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Nun
  9. Masters of Meditation and Miracles
  10. Poluonai Zhuan
  11. Precious Essence
  12. Rdo-rin Bandi-tai rnam thar
  13. Rosary of White Lotuses
  14. Sky Dancer
  15. The Autobiography of Jamgon Kongtrul
  16. The Biography of Pha jo sgom Zhig po
  17. The divine madman- the sublime life and songs of Drukpa Kunley (1455 – 1529)
  18. The Fugitive Lives of the Sixth Dalai Lama
  19. The Lamp That Enlightens Narrow Minds- Life and Times of// //a Realized Tibetan Master, Khyentse Chökyi Wangchug
  20. The Life and Works of Shardza Tashi Gyeltsen
  21. The Life of Longchenpa- The Omniscient Dharma King of the Vast Expanse
  22. The Life of Shabkar
  23. The Life of Yol mo ‘dzin nor bu
  24. The spiritual biography of Marpa, the translator
  25. Tibet’s great yogī Milarepa- a biography from the Tibetan
  26. When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty- The Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet
  27. Biography of Milarepa Archie
  28. Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo_Kelsang
  29. Jan Willis biographies-Xiaobai
  30. Life of Milarepa Garrett
  31. MA Biography of Dudjom Dorjee zhouyang (duplicate)
  32. Marpa Biography Summary by India (duplicate)
  33. Play of the Omniscient Samyak
  34. Yichen Wang DL5 17th c
  35. Yolmo Tenzin Norbu 1598-1644 abstract_Heimann
  36. Yunzheng Chen – Biography of Choying Dorje Abstract & Summary