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Digital Gazetteer Standards for History and Culture
Ruth Mostern
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
www.ecai.org
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£
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
• AuthorityHeavenly Master Zhang Daoling
• Primary SourceStele Inscription (165)
• Secondary SourceCollection of Stele Inscriptions from Sichuan Province (1985)
• ContibutorBen 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 guidelinese.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: [email protected]
• Susan Stone: [email protected]
• www.ecai.org
