Names change, places too. The Challenge of Developing Geodata-Based Gazetteer Research Technologies and Methods

In recent years, various disciplines have been creating a number of digital gazetteers, thereby collecting an increasing amount of data. The growing number of gazetteers reflects the high demand for this structured data in various disciplines, such as history, geography, archaeology, climate change research etc. However, differences in these new data sources, including metadata, have led to severe challenges in terms of their scientific usage.

The Herder Institute (HI), the Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) and the Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) have joined forces to take up this challenge. Instead of setting up a new gazetteer, the project team aims to analyze historical case studies that show how regimes of geographical knowledge changed between the 18th and 21st centuries; for this purpose, the team will create a web application that allows access to multiple online gazetteers and enables the comparison of their contents and metadata. Using known metadata and data integration architectures, they are developing critical methodologies and a research network with infrastructure for its sustainability  to support research involving or using place names.

Gazetteers and geographical names represent arrangements of power and knowledge, i.e. geographical discourses. By creating gazetteers and defining place names, scientific and state authorities determine perspectives on the world, or on a specific continent or region. The analysis of gazetteers and their varying scope and content from the 18th to the 21st century provides an example par excellence through which to investigate how arrangements of power and knowledge have changed since the early modern period and how they are currently changing on entering the digital era. Like using a magnifying glass, the study of gazetteers shows mechanisms and consequences of digitization processes that apply to various other fields including the transformation from analogue to digital encyclopedias and how these define the “state of the art” of specialist knowledge; the change of economic statistics and how they structure international trade and dependence; the development of environmental monitoring and how it defines borders and frontiers of “ecological restoration”, and more.