Linking Pasts with Historical Gazetteers

GIS Day @ Vanderbilt University November 15, 2017
Linking Pasts with
Historical Gazetteers
Karl Grossner, PhD
World History Center,
University of Pittsburgh

Linking Pasts refers to…
 Linking historical data developed by, used in,
and published by research projects in many
disciplines
 An annual symposium hosted by the Pelagios
project (Linked Pasts III is 4-6 Dec. @ Stanford)
 A working group of Pelagios Commons
(Linked Pasts WG)
http://commons.pelagios.org

www.geohumanities.org
GeoHumanities

A spatial turn
http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/
by Jo Guldi (SMU;
https://www.joguldi.com/)

GeoHumanities
What do humanists want?
What do humanists need?
What might humanists get?”
Peter K. Bol (2011)
In Dear, M. et al (Eds.) GeoHumanities: Art,
history, text at the edge of place.
a. Maps and some spatial
analysis
b. A world-historical gazetteer
c. ??
“
www.geohumanities.org

Geo-parsing, geo-tagging
http://recogito.pelagios.org/help/tutoria
If research questions are spatial,
sources (texts, maps, tabular
data) must be
geo-parsed: extract place
references (names, usually)
or
geo-tagged
geo-coded: identify a
suitable location

Why a world-historical
gazetteer?
• Time matters. Places typically have multiple
names, which change over time
• Places themselves come and go
• Many areas of the world are underserved
• Modern gazetteers are
problematic
• lack useful temporal information
• don’t offer useful reconciliation
services

Where is Poland?

What’s a gazetteer?
a geographic information system

Gazetteers…
have been defined variously as
geographical indexes or dictionaries (OED)
specialized indexes of place names, minimally (Name, Type,
Location)
have been in existence since Strabo’s Geographica
(b. ~63 BCE; d. ~24 CE)
1999 - 2004: First global digital gazetteer developed
as part of Alexandria Digital Library @ UC Santa
Barbara
By 2017, a profusion of digital gazetteers and a
rapidly growing number of digital historical gazetteers

http://www.geonames.org/4644585/

More modern digital
gazetteers
• Google Maps, etc
• Navigating modern roads,
• Locating points of interest
• MapZen Places
• Modern places
• New competitor to GeoNames,
better curated
• Getty Thesaurus of
Geographic Names (TGN)
• Few coordinates, locations in
hierarchy

Descriptive Gazetteers
Ancient, Medieval, Modern Cases
cf. Mostern & Southall (2016) Gazetteers Past. In Placing Names: Enriching and
Integrating Gazetteers

Strabo
Geographica
(20 BC – 23 AD)
pictured, title page from
1620 edition
geography:
description of the land
chorography:
description of “political

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of
_Europe_according_to_Strabo.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:C
%2BB-Geography-Map1-StrabosMap.PNG

Representation on a modern map of Iberia according to Strabo
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iberia-Strabon-
es.png

Chinese local
gazetteers/histories

Chinese local
• Song Dynasty (960-1279), 地方志 (“difangzhi”)
local histories studied by
• Will, Pierre-Étienne (1992)
• Hargett, James (1996)
• Bol, Peter (2001)
• Mostern, Ruth M. (2011)
• Will: “…as early as the Sui and Tang” (6-10 c.);
proto-gazetteers in 4c
• (“tujing”), “maps with explanation”

Chinese local
• The land (topography, hydrology, toponomy,
products, monuments
• Its inhabitants (population, customs,
prominent families and individuals, literary
works)
• Its government (structure, personnel, finances,
biography)
• Local contemporary and historical accounts of
“the situation”
• These became objects of historical study in 18c.

Great Britain: Itineraries to
Gazetteers
 The Itinerary of John Leland in or
about the Years 1535 – 1543
 Britannia
William Camden (1551-1623)
 A tour thro' the whole island
of Great Britain
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
 Villare Cantianum (1659)
 Imperial Gazetteer of
England and Wales (1870-1872)
 Gazetteer of the World (1856)

Gazetteer of the World, or
Dictionary of Geographic Knowledge (1859)

Lippincott’s Gazetteer of the World (1856)

Historical Gazetteers
Everything (?) old is new again

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/

http://pleiades.stoa.org/
“a community-built gazetteer
and graph of ancient places”

• Title
• Description
• URI
• Representative point
• Location(s)
• Names
• Makes connection
with
• Has connection with
• Place type
• References
• Evidence
• See Further
• See Also

Bol’s desiderata
A world-historical gazetteer

Bol’s world-historical gazetteer
• It must accommodate multiple indicators of
temporality, including (i) start and end “valid”
dates; (ii) date of source in which it is mentioned
• It must be multilingual, for both place names and
feature types
• It should incorporate gazetteer data from multiple
historical projects (local and national)... also
volunteered information
• It must be “...open-ended and cumulative;” i.e.
extensible; able to grow in a completely flexible
manner
• It must be built with a viable strategy for long-term
sustainability

Meeting Bol’s requirements +
 Extensibility
 Multivocality
 Integration
 Sustainability
• Represent indeterminate, uncertain temporal
and spatial values
• Model space and time (place and period)
together
Grossner, Janowicz & Keßler. (2016).
Place, Period, and Setting for Linked Data
Gazetteers.
In Berman, M.L., Mostern, R. and Southall, H.
(Eds.)
Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating
Gazetteers.

A plethora
Long-standing
 Pleiades
“a community-built gazetteer and
graph of ancient places”
 Great Britain Historical GIS
“information about Britain's localities
as they have changed over time
 A Vision of Britain Through Time
“maps, statistical trends and historical
descriptions; 1801 - present
 Trismegistos (places, people, texts)
”…papyrological and epigraphical
resources; principally Egypt and the
Nile valley (800 BC-AD 800)”
 Map of Early Modern London
"a standard for placenames ca. 1550-
1650."
Emerging
 al-Ṯurayyā: ”a geospatial model
of the early Islamic world"
 Kima: “open digital historical
Hebrew gazetteer
 Pelagios Commons al Sur
“the early period of the Conquest
of South America (16-17 c.)
 Early Modern Europe
 The Dutch colonial world
 Syriaca.org
 Slave Societies Digital Archive
“Africans in the Atlantic World;
16th to the 20th centuries”
Vanderbilt University

a virtuous circle
Linked Open Data in humanities research

People
Cultural
Objects Places
sources
data
products

People
Cultural
Objects P l a c e s
Name ID Lat Long
Nashville P1234 36.1
6
86.78
Memphis P1235 35.1
4
90.04
…
Name ID BirthYear BirthLoc
Duane Allman A9876 1947 P1234
Memphis Slim A9877 1915 P1235

G a z e t t e e r ( N a m e A u t h o r i t y )
People
Cultural
Objects P l a c e s
Name ID Lat Long
6
86.78
Memphis P1235 35.1
4
90.04
…
Name ID Lat Long Type
Nashville, IN GN63457 39.2 86.25 USA Town
Nashville, TN GN39586 36.16 86.78 USA City
Memphis GN49203 29.84 -31.25 Egypt Ruin
Memphis, TN GN5829 35.14 90.04 USA City

G a z e t t e e r ( N a m e A u t h o r i t y )
People
Cultural
Objects P l a c e s
Name ID Lat Long ExactMatch
6
86.78 gn:4644585
Memphis P1235 35.1
4
90.04 gn:58293
…
Name ID Lat Long Type
Nashville, IN 63457 39.2 86.25 USA Town
Nashville, TN 4644585 36.16 86.78 USA City
Memphis 49203 29.84 -31.25 Egypt Ruin
Memphis, TN 58293 35.14 90.04 USA City
I n t e r c o n n e c t i o n
F o r m a t
( R D F , ? ? )
LOD Cloud

Linked Pasts vision
search, browse, visualize
Ap p s + AP Is
Periods
People
Places
Events
Cultural
Objects
“union index”

Linked Data
"a recommended best practice for exposing,
sharing, and connecting pieces of data,
information, and knowledge on the Semantic
Web using URIs and RDF."
 links data, not documents
 URL + protocol (e.g. http://)
use them to name resources
 Resource Description Framework
(XML-like format of Subj-Pred-Obj triples)
Semantic Web
URI
RDF
-- Tim Berners-
Lee

Ruth Mostern (WHC Director)
Principal Investigator
Karl Grossner
Technical Director
Ryan Horne
WHC post-doctoral fellow
Patrick Manning (WHC Founder)
Project consultant
NEH-funded project at the
University of Pittsburgh’s
World History Center
(2017-2019)

Enhanced gazetteers
For places, agents, cultural objects

a Linked Pasts vision
Ap p s + AP Is
Cultural
Objects
People
Places
Periods
Events
“union index”

Pelagios
Ap p s + AP Is
Cultural
Objects
People
Places
“union index”

Peripleo

World-Historical
Gazetteer

World-Historical Gazetteer
Ap p s + AP Is
WHG
Global “Spine”
Gazetteer
Cultural
Objects
People
Places
Events
“union index”

World-Historical Gazetteer
• Focus on centuries after 1500
• Broader range of place types in “spine,”
including
• Peoples (ethnonyms) and associated languages
• Cultural and physical geographic regions
• Historical routes and itineraries
• Mountain ranges, watersheds
• Ocean currents
• Bibliographic links
• “Topical signatures” for places derived from
texts
WHG
Global “Spine”
Gazetteer

Data for the “spine”

W-H Gazetteer Spine Record
Name
Locations
ID
URI
Relations (within, part-of)
Snippets (abstract)
Links (close-, exact-match)
Place
1
1
1..*
0..*
When0..*
0..*
0..*
0..*
Source1
PlaceType1..*

W-H Gazetteer Union Index
ID
URI
Place
1
1
ConflationOf1..*
Title1

Questions? Comments?
http://whgazetteer.org
http://linkedplaces.org
e: grossner@pitt.edu
t: @kgeographer

Linking Pasts with Historical Gazetteers

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