What Belongs in a Gazetteer?

Ruth MosternUniversity of California, Merced

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, SeattleApril 13, 2011

Gazetteer Attributes

names feature types locations

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.)

What Else Can Gazetteers Do?

Prefectures Counties

Established

No change

Abolished

Established

The spatial history of Song Dynasty China (960-1276)

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.

http://songgis.ucmercedlibrary.info

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?

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

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

• 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!

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

Back to the Twelfth Century?

From Vision of Britain