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What Belongs in a Gazetteer? Ruth Mostern University of California, Merced Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Seattle April 13, 2011
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Gazetteer Attributes namesfeature typeslocations The Alexandria Digital Library, 2004 interface (This is more than digital infrastructure. For a historian or cultural geographer, mapping the globe’s 80 Merceds creates a view of the Spanish world system.)
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What Else Can Gazetteers Do? PrefecturesCounties Established No change Abolished Established The spatial history of Song Dynasty China (960-1276)
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Song Dynasty Spatial Change These findings are based on a place name – feature type – location gazetteer which also includes place- making events and their dates.
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http://songgis.ucmercedlibrary.info
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What Else Might Gazetteers Do? Historical network analysis: a map from Janet Abu Lughod’s Before European Hegemony. World historians use trade and travel maps like this to identify connection points and core- periphery structures, but not yet in a data-rich and digital mode. What if we also include relationships among places (for instance the order in which they appear along an itinerary) and a few more attributes?
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OWTRAD (Old World Trade) Sixty-five temporally and spatially referenced comma-delimited files organized according by travel routes and nodes. Author Matthew Ciolek created the datasets by hand from published works of scholarship, which he cites. Thinking about world history as a scholarly field, this is a world history gazetteer. http://www.ciolek.com/owtrad.html
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The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1160s), by Jesus Carillo, student in my spring 2010 History of the Silk Road course. Student Travel Narrative Project
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Michael Curry, “Toward a Geography of a World Without Maps: Lessons from Ptolemy and Postal Codes.” Three modes of thinking about the world: – Choros (names and regions) – Topos (travels, itineraries, and relationships) – Geos (mathematically oriented maps of continuous space) A hand reconstruction of postal carrier routes, from a 1993 academic article. A traditional gazetteer approach A GIS approach Something new!
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More Attributes to Consider Names: – Their origin, etymology, and semantics may be meaningful and worth including in a database. – What to include? Yi-fu Tuan: “the number of places in the world is infinite.” – Language and politics. Doreen Massey: “history is the meeting up of places.” Feature types: are domain specific. Integrating them between gazetteers requires some ontology. Georeferences: Locations can be vague or even mythical, but the places exist in a text and in reference to other places. Sources: historical gazetteers need to reference historical sources. Palestine 1946
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Back to the Twelfth Century? From Vision of Britain
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