Using ESRI ArcGIS Online to Map Jeju’s Shrines

Since last year, I’ve been getting into the ArcGIS online tools initially for academic presentations and teaching and gradually into more complex applications for larger academic interests. Aside from being a fancy tool to show off locations and its relation to my interests, I’ve also become more aware of the potential that digital visualization of larger volumes of data (not “big data” – I’m not working with hundreds of thousands of figures or terrabytes worth of info here!) can offer to analyze cultural geography and also consider additional questions. I am still very much new to all of this and have for the most part been learning as I go with no formal training aside from occasional consultations with UC Merced’s SpARC Lab.

With all of us larger confined indoors, I returned to putting together a digital map of Jeju City’s 300+ remaining shamanic shrines using information collected from the Jeju City volume of the 2008 Jeju Shrine Survey commissioned by the provincial government. This Herculean effort was the first major survey and compilation of key information – the type of sinche (“divine body,” or the point of access to this world for the spirit), types of offerings, ritual days, patron deities, function, divine lineage – on Jeju’s many shrines and their remains that survived into the early twenty-first century. While an invaluable source, the Jeju Shrine Survey does have its flaws. Aside from some outdated information, the accompanying maps are extremely vague and some GPS coordinates are inaccurate, perhaps due to the wide technological gap between 2008 tech and the precision of current tools. I have heard that an updated version was in the works last time I was in Jeju in 2019, but I do not know yet if it is completed. The current COVID-19 issue further complicates things as I cannot travel to Jeju to confirm on-site. Due to these limitations, I have continued to use the 2008 work and have attempted to check the locations using online satellite views as a working, albeit imperfect, solution. The map will be continuously updated as I input more of the data onto this map. Each individual point can be clicked to bring up additional information.

https://arcg.is/1vjOeT