I’m planning a paper that uses numerical data and place names in historical chronicles to study patterns of state expansion and contraction in western and central mainland SOutheast Asia (c. 1200-1700).

About two published papers, 2 years ago, I tried to use a gigantic dataset available through the Harvard-Yenching site you give as a link, a dataset that had about every river and stream and coastal boundary from BUrma to Tibet to Korea, but….

I found the GIS software (Mapinfo?) incredibly complex and almost impossible to use. Couldn’t even start pruning the millions of distracting little streams, so I just trashed it and drew a rough map with photoshop. Still on my to-do list though, make a beautiful and precise map with a GIS system. Already have the longitude and latitude points of the settlements. Regional boundaries are a little bit more difficult, but believe can be extracted roughly from gazetteer. Sorely in need of a GIS book, that sketches the big picture and then steps through some common steps that historians commonly need.