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