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  • Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers ed. by Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth Mostern, and Humphrey Southall
  • Anne Kelly Knowles
Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers. Edited by Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth Mostern, and Humphrey Southall (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2016) 265 pp. $50.00 cloth $49.99 e-book.

Gazetteers used to be the last and least-consulted pages in atlases and dictionaries. Now, without realizing it, people use them whenever they check the location of a restaurant on their phone, surf the web for vacation ideas, or check a fact on Wikipedia, "arguably . . . the largest and most widely used gazetteer" (23). Digital gazetteers are also increasingly common infrastructure for place-based research in the humanities and social sciences, as well as an object of study in their own right.

As the editors point out in their excellent introductory essay, gazetteers of one kind or another were much more common than maps until about 1800. Printed itineraries told people in words how to travel from place to place. Local, regional, and national histories, overwhelmingly textual, described places in often marvelous detail, the writing as much a geography lesson as historical account. Historical-geographical gazetteers were re-issued and revised for decades and centuries in East Asia, leaving a legacy that many of the contributors to this book are mining for historical gazetteers in digital form. Print literature dating back to the early modern period, and the amazing variety of British place names, are two more inspirations for today's digital gazetteers. Translating such rich linguistic sources into computer database form, however, raises a host of problems, which are the focus of many of the fifteen chapters in Placing Names. Among the most difficult issues are how to distinguish places with the same name, how to be sure that the many versions of a place name refer to the same place, how to incorporate change over time, and how to make digital gazetteers as richly informative as their sources without reverting to the long form originals. [End Page 561]

At a minimum, a gazetteer is a list of place names and their locations. Enriched gazetteers, which this book advocates, include much more—the names for each place throughout its history; all linguistic variants; "attestations" (source documents or citations) for each instance; and the time period for the use of each name. Integrating kindred gazetteers through unique place-name identifiers, contributors argue, could enable more informative searching and support a new generation of research about the history of places and the literary texts that describe them. Some of the contributors envision gazetteers as a spatio-temporal knowledge base that could serve as the "linchpin" of place-based digital scholarship (199). These dreamers imagine the day when users can move effortlessly from one gazetteer to another, gathering information as bees gather pollen. Other authors explain more specific digital projects. In Mark Henderson and Karl Ryavec's study of mosques in China, for example, a gazetteer of historical places anchored the research. For Janelle Jenstad, close study of "Civitas Londinum," a sixteenth-century bird's-eye view of London, inspired the creation of a historical gazetteer based on the map's wealth of place-names.

For nearly two decades, the editors of Placing Names have been leaders in developing digital gazetteers, setting standards for their implementation, and linking gazetteers to historical gis (geographical information systems). This book, the first on the subject, reflects their expertise. Berman's and Mostern's background in East Asian history, and Southall's in British historical geography, bring to this volume a deep understanding of the difficulty of capturing and representing historical places in computer databases. The editors' technical expertise may explain why passages in many chapters discuss data structures and coding decisions in language that non-experts may find impenetrable. Anyone with basic knowledge of xml and JavaScript, however, will appreciate these sections as how-to guides for gazetteer builders. Summaries in plain English of the code quotations and screen shots from databases would have been a welcome addition to the captions.

Some of the contributors write as well as the editors. "In a platial world," writes Michael F. Goodchild, "it is names that provide linkages...

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