Earth deity shrines of the Greater Taipei area: A first edition curated dataset

Abstract

Community tutelary shrines in Taiwan have been identified as excellent resources for grassroots-level heritage. As community ritual assemblages, they are able to encode data about a settlement’s social, political and economic history in their material composition, aesthetic choices, artefacts, displays and orientations. This data paper previews a first edition dataset related to 752 such shrines found throughout the greater Taipei area in northern Taiwan. It explores the basis for such a dataset, how it can be used and what has been produced. This dataset is available on the depositar research data repository, operated out of the Institute of Information Sciences at Academia Sinica in Taipei and is publicly available for download.

Keywords

• spatial humanities
• Tudi Gong
• earth deity
• tutela