Digital Gazetteer Standards for History and Culture Ruth Mostern Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative UC Berkeley

Gazetteers for history and culture I Multiple points of view… Multilingual data…

The Capital of China –Beijing Shih ¥_ ¨Ê ¥« –Pei-p'ing Shih ¥_ ¥­ ¥« –Beijing –Peiping Municipal Administrative Area –Peking –Peiping Municipality –Peking Municipality –Yan/Yen /¿P –Gaydon –Dadu/Tatu /¤j ³£

Gazetteers for history and culture II Data comes from texts…

An Eighteenth Century European Map of Africa: Point of view Cartography Competing toponyms

An Eleventh Century Map of China: How should reliability be assigned to data like this? Can useful geography be assigned?

An eighth century Chinese star chart Can (should?) gazetteers capture indigenous conceptions of space?

Information has complex pedigrees Kingdom of the Heavenly Masters Enlarged, 160 CE Authority Heavenly Master Zhang Daoling Primary Source Stele Inscription (165) Secondary Source Collection of Stele Inscriptions from Sichuan Province (1985) Contibutor Ben Brose

Gazetteers for history and culture III Complex temporal change in all characteristics

What’s the feature type? Recreational building (Roman era) Cultural site (present)

How to address these considerations Content standard e.g. Allow exhaustive documentation Feature type thesaurus e.g. “numinous places” Best practice guidelines e.g. for articulating temporal change in places

The Clearinghouse vision Multiple gazetteers Using gazetteers as spatial references

What does the spatial humanities look like? Integrating historical maps, images and authored text Including time stamping Dealing with spatial uncertainty

A spatial viewer for historical data Capacity to show change over time Connected with a clearinghouse of distributed data Objects linked to additional web- based information about places

For more information… Ruth Mostern: Susan Stone: