Recently, with the development and popularization of digital technology, countries around the world are paying more attention to digital utilization of cultural resources. The concept of Cultural Computing was proposed by Tosa Naoko in 2005 (Tosa et al., 2005). It emphasizes the combination of computer technologies to enhance, extend and transform human creative products and processes (Haydar, et al., 2011) by establishing a comprehensive resource development system for capturing, storing, processing, disseminating, and presenting culture. The field of cultural computing pays attention to the empowering effects of computer technology on cultural arts, humanities and social sciences. It seeks to capture, explore and disseminate cultural essence using technology, promote digital humanities research, and facilitate cultural prosperity and development.
Local gazetteers are known as local encyclopedias (Needham, 1974), which is regional, extensive, authoritative and inclusive (Ji and Liu, 2017), comprehensively recording the development of a specific period of a specific region. They not only serve to supplement the official history, but also recreate stories, inspire citizens' local patriotism (Moreno and Thomas, 2014), and enhance cultural identity and national identity. With the development of new local gazetteers and digital gazetteers engineering, more and more scholars have recognized the importance of information technology in the development and utilization of local gazetteers, which can serve as a reference for historical phenomena, summarize evolutionary laws, and solve humanistic problems. However, current research on local gazetteers often focuses on a specific topic, lacking a comprehensive analysis of the entire gazetteer or region. The research methods also lack scientific rigor, leaving much room for improvement.
Therefore, comparing the huge potential value of local gazetteers with the current situation of insufficient excavation, we conduct the research within the overall framework of cultural computation methodology.
Firstly, we analyze the resource characteristics, application value and demand of local gazetteers, summarizes the analysis goals of local gazetteers at the resource level, content level and computing level, and locks the development objects of local gazetteers into five categories of carrier features, thematic features, elemental features, associated features and numerical features. These five types of features are introduced in turn. Carrier features are used to describe the carrier information of the physical or digital form of local gazetteers. Thematic features are used to describe the central theme of the whole or part of the content of the local gazetteers. Elemental features are used to describe the key descriptive entities contained in the content of the local gazetteers. Associated features are used to describe the relationship between the entities contained in the content of the local gazetteers. Numerical features are used to describe the format and structure of other data features of the local gazetteers.
Secondly, we construct a multidimensional feature analysis model of local gazetteers, taking cultural genes input as the process starting point, after digitizing local gazetteers, feature description and generation, splitting the original local gazetteers into a collection of data features as input data for cultural calculation. Then we use quantitative techniques such as statistical analysis, spatiotemporal analysis and social network analysis as the calculation process, and visual graphs such as knowledge graph as the calculation results to realize systematic local gazetteers multivariate analysis.
Finally, the above path is applied to the case of Zhejiang Tongzhi to explain the folk culture origin of Zhejiang Province, the West Lake story and surrounding relics, the social network of cultural celebrities and other local characteristics knowledge to spread the West Lake culture and promote the living heritage of regional culture.