From named place to naming event: creating gazetteers for history

Abstract

For historians and other scholars of the human past, gazetteers are best seen as records of events in the histories of places, rather than as indexes of named places per se. This paper discusses the episodic nature of historical temporality, the narrative form of reasoning in history, and the value of using events as the basis for gazetteers in order to reflect the character of knowledge about historical places. It identifies the attributes of a historical event and introduces the idea that a historical event gazetteer must build networks of relationships among events in order to effectively represent historical narrative. It reviews relevant bodies of literature and proposes a procedure for identifying chronological, mereological, and causal relationships among historical events. Finally, it suggests new directions in spatiotemporal visualization of history, with reference to a prototype developed by the authors.

Keywords:

• Gazetteer
• Event
• Chronology
• History
• Narrative
• Spatiotemporal visualization

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Tom Murtagh, Kim Jackson, Artem Osmakov, Maria Shvedova, Tobias Peirick and Hanna Chamoun (Sydney University Archaeological Computing Laboratory) for development of the software for the pilot historical event gazetteer, Andrew Wilson (Sydney University Archaeological Computing Laboratory) for assistance with graphics, and Elijah Meeks (University of California, Merced) for collection of data for the Silk Road pilot and bibliographical research. The work was supported by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and a short‐term Visiting Fellowship from the University of Sydney.

We would also like to acknowledge Google Docs and Skype, which allowed us to write this paper on the move and across four continents in a truly cooperative mode of simultaneous editing and discussion.

Finally, we are grateful to Michael Buckland, Peter Reimann, Jeff Yoshimi, and the anonymous journal referees for valuable comments and pointers to additional literature.

Notes

1. The ISO 19108 spatial temporal standard, developed by the ISO TC/211 Secretariat, also describes spatial data. However it is concerned strictly with defining the temporal primitives (intervals, duration, instances and events) that collectively constitute all temporal objects and with describing and using calendars and clocks to describe temporal primitives (ISO TC/211 Secretariat 2002).