A century of Atayal migration history — scattered across colonial archives, brought into a single interactive atlas.
Live Demo — Migration Map
The Smangus migration spans six stages across the Hsinchu mountains. Toggle between a modern OSM basemap and the 1924 Japanese colonial map to see the same landscape recorded a century apart.
Fully interactive — click markers, switch basemaps, zoom.
Smangus migration route — six stages from Pinsbkan to the present-day village site.
Live Demo — Colonial Era Settlements
The Kinaji and Marikowan groups shaped this region during the Japanese colonial period. Color encoding — blue and red — makes their distribution readable at a glance without requiring text on every marker.
Click any marker to see the settlement name in both Atayal and Chinese.
Kinaji (blue) and Marikowan (red) settlements, overlaid on the 1924 Japanese colonial map.
Live Demo — 3D Terrain
Migration routes are not arbitrary. This 3D terrain scan of the Smangus area makes visible why certain paths were taken, why certain sites were chosen, and how the physical geography constrained every move.
Drag to rotate · scroll to zoom.
Design Decision 01
Early explorations considered a text-heavy, article-style layout with embedded static maps. But discussions with researchers at Academia Sinica made clear that spatial relationships are the primary information — not supplementary illustration. The atlas was restructured to make the interactive map the central interface, with text serving as annotation rather than narrative.
Markers are clustered at meaningful geographic scales and labels appear only on interaction — reducing visual noise for researchers who need to compare settlement positions across the two basemaps.
Design Decision 02
The ability to toggle between a modern OSM basemap and the 1924 Japanese colonial survey map was not originally planned. It was added after realizing that overlaying the same settlement data on both maps reveals how colonial documentation shaped — and sometimes distorted — the spatial record. For academic users, this toggle is the most valuable feature: it turns a visualization into a tool for critical analysis.
For general audiences, the toggle provides a tangible sense of temporal change. For researchers, it enables direct comparison of cartographic sources — same coordinates, different interpretations of the landscape.
Context
Smangus (司馬庫斯) is an Atayal village in Hsinchu County. Its history exists across scattered colonial survey maps, migration records, and field notes — disconnected, inaccessible to most people, and never visualized together.
This project was built during a summer internship at Academia Sinica's Geographic Information System Center. The goal was to georeference Japanese colonial-era maps, process the spatial datasets, and build an interactive atlas that makes a century of indigenous history genuinely explorable.
Target Users
The atlas was designed for two distinct audiences, each with different needs. Understanding these users directly shaped the information architecture.
This dual audience led to a key design decision: three separate map layers with increasing complexity. The migration route offers a narrative entry point for general audiences, the colonial settlement map enables detailed academic comparison, and the 3D terrain provides physical context for both groups.
Result
Now part of Academia Sinica's permanent digital humanities archive. Three interactive layers, over a century of spatial history, accessible through a single web experience.