 |
Thesauri and Gazetteer Work Session (May 24, 9 am)
Ruth Mostern
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, University of California, Berkeley
Leader, ECAI Gazetteers Team
Human activity in time and place is very complex. Places names alter
when political regimes change (e.g. from Belgian Congo, to Zaire, to Congo).
When regimes or languages coexist, names do as well (e.g. Beijing and
Beiping, Tibet and Xizang). Boundaries change over time as cities expand
or empires are extinguished, and sometimes places literally move from
one location to the other, but retain all of their other characteristics.
Some kinds of places have very clear spatial footprints; others (e.g.
the Silk Road) are extremely abstract. In addition to the need to accommodate
such characteristics of places and their attributes, the work of creating
a historical gazetteer is made more complex by the fragmentary nature
of the source base for historical places, and the ambiguities and elisions
in the sources that exist. Feature type searching for distributed gazetteers,
moreover, requires agreement on a thesaurus that can, at a generic level,
accommodate all possible ways of designating places. This session concerns
the attempts of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initative to adapt gazetteer
standards and develop practices adequate for a global, multilingual community
of historians and humanities scholars.
|
Home | Activities
| Community | Projects
| Technology | Participating
|
