forwarded by
Angie
-------- Original Message --------
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:
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