forwarded by Angie

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        The decline and fall of the descriptive gazetteer
Date:   Wed, 15 Jan 2014 16:27:32 +0000
From:   humphrey <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To:       A forum for issues related to map & spatial data
librarianship <[log in to unmask]>
To:     [log in to unmask]



As some members of this list will know, I am co-editing a book about
gazetteers, especially future digital gazetteers; but also authoring an
introductory chapter which looks at the history of gazetteers, a
surprisingly little explored topic.

Our general point is that, although most people’s idea of a gazetteer is
simply a list of geographical names each with some kind of coordinate
and sometime with a simple “feature type”, like “settlement” or
“mountain”, there is an earlier history of gazetteers which provide
lengthy descriptions of each place/feature.

We have computerised several of these for our web site, A Vision of
Britain through Time, and are currently working on tidying up the
seven-volume "/Gazetteer of the World, or Dictionary of Geographical
Knowledge,/published by Fullarton's of Edinburgh in 1856; this has
already been digitised within Google Books, but we are turning it into
clean database content. We estimate it contains around 80,000 entries
and 7m words, so the average entry is a couple of sentences, and many go
on for several pages. Similarly, this “entry” for Edinburgh in Groome’s
/Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland/ (1882-4) contains over 100,000 words:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/descriptions/108700

SUCH BOOKS ARE NOT SO MUCH PLACE DICTIONARIES AS PLACE ENCYCLOPAEDIAS. I
HAVE BEEN EXPLORING THEIR EARLY HISTORY, BUT THIS POSTING IS TO ASK
ABOUT THEIR LATER HISTORY, AFTER 1900.

My basic narrative at the moment is that descriptive gazetteers, as
distinct from itineraries, first appear in the mid to  late seventeenth
century, and the lengthiest examples come from the second half of the
nineteenth century — but they then pretty much stop — when I have looked
at the shelves of gazetteers in various libraries I have mainly seen
books from the 19th century, occasionally earlier.

The exceptions seem to be:

— There are of course lots of atlases which also include a gazetteer at
the back (but this is about books which are primarily text)

— Bartholomew have kept publishing revised editions of their Gazetteer
of the British Isles (but that has relatively short entries, so more a
place dictionary than an encyclopaedia).

— Various guides aimed mainly at tourists are organised as sets of
alphabetically arranged entries about places, with descriptions; for
example, various Shell Guides. However, map libraries are less likely to
hold these.

IS THIS A FAIR NARRATIVE? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BIG DESCRIPTIVE
GAZETTEERS AFTER 1900?

One suggestion is that they were supplanted by broader encyclopaedias, a
substantial fraction of whose headwords are typically toponyms. I have
sometimes suggested that the world’s biggest and most widely used
digital gazetteer is now Wikipedia; I once sampled 100 randomly selected
Wikipedia articles, and about 30% had an associated global coordinate.

I WOULD BE VERY GRATEFUL FOR ANY THOUGHTS ANYONE HAS. I continue to find
it bizarre that so much has been written about the history of maps and
so little about the history of gazetteers and itineraries.

With thanks,

Humphrey Southall

Reader in Geography/
Director, GB Historical GIS
University of Portsmouth
Geography Dept, Buckingham Bldg,
Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE, UK
www.gbhgis.org <http://www.gbhgis.org/> & www.visionofbritain.org.uk
<http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/>