Exploring moats and their places of memory using multi-source data: The case study of Yangtze river delta region.

The city moat was an important part of the city's fortification system in history and used to be one of the typical landmarks in the city. As an important cluster of places of memory in the city, the moat waterfront with the surrounding cultural resources has become an important space for inheriting the collective memory of residents and reflecting the city's history and culture. The surrounding environment and functions of moats have, however, changed during the urban development, which often made the moats unidentifiable in urban settings now. Therefore, how to clarify and interpret the connotational cultural value of urban moats with their places of memory is an issue of great practical significance. The paper tries to collect, analyze and interpret information to identify moat waterfront and their surrounding places of memory, to highlight their cultural significance with multi-resource data. The first step is to constitute an inventory of the existing moat waterfront inside Yangtze River delta region based on ancient text data and multi-temporal satellite photos; Secondly, a dataset of places of memory is constructed and analyzed based on multi-source data, such as local gazetteers and interviews. The last step is to create an interactive story map that contains historical information and cultural resources of each moat using GIS. This paper aims to illustrate a scheme for a public-oriented visualized dataset, which is used to clearly present the detailed information and their cultural value of the places of memory along the moats in the Yangtze River Delta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]