Scenery deconstruction: a new approach to understanding the historical characteristics of Nanjing cultural landscape

Abstract The “Eight Scenic Views Paintings” represent crucial visual materials for investigating the history of cultural landscapes. However, traditional methods of interpreting materials struggle to discern the inherent connections between different landscape elements. This study proposes an approach for deconstructing historical images, taking the example of the Forty Scenic Views in the Late Ming Dynasty in Nanjing, China. To explore the co-occurrence structure, hierarchical clustering, and correlation features among various elements, various digital humanities quantification methods were applied, including spatial analysis of ArcGIS, co-occurrence and clustering of KH Coder, and correlation analysis of SPSS. This study reveals the characteristics of the landscape construction of Nanjing in the Late Ming: natural landscape as the foundation, artificial landscape as the core, and advocating tradition as the fashion. It also uncovers the landscape order: mountains, waters, and scenic views interweaved and coexisted, as well as nature and culture intertwined and clustered. In addition, multiple information graphs of the subordinate and co-occurrence relationships of 20 landscape elements were constructed, 5 landscape paradigms were extracted, and 36 pairs of related relationships were discovered, deepening the historical understanding of the urban landscape construction of Nanjing in the Late Ming. This paper puts forward the idea of analyzing historical images by digital method, which provides some essential and detailed historical basis for explaining the value of cultural landscape heritage and shaping contemporary urban landscape.