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"Gazetteers"
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The Cambridge gazetteer of the United States and Canada : a dictionary of places
A dictionary of over 12,000 places in the United States and Canada, including expanded coverage of communities, geographic features, and regions of historical significance.
Book
Placing Names
Well before the innovation of maps, gazetteers served as the main geographic referencing system for hundreds of years. Consisting of a specialized index of place names, gazetteers traditionally linked descriptive elements with topographic features and coordinates. Placing Names is inspired by that tradition of discursive place-making and by contemporary approaches to digital data management that have revived the gazetteer and guided its development in recent decades. Adopted by researchers in the Digital Humanities and Spatial Sciences, gazetteers provide a way to model the kind of complex cultural, vernacular, and perspectival ideas of place that can be located in texts and expanded into an interconnected framework of naming history. This volume brings together leading and emergent scholars to examine the history of the gazetteer, its important role in geographic information science, and its use to further the reach and impact of spatial reasoning into the digital age.
eBook
From Fenye to Latitude and Longitude: The Adjustment and Renewal of the Positioning System in Chinese Local Gazetteers during Qing Dynasty
Influenced by a cosmological view of the interconnectedness between heaven and humankind, ancient Chinese astrologers developed the
(分野, “field allocation”) system. This theory envisioned correspondence between heaven and earth and was a prevalent regional positioning system in ancient China. However, during the Qianlong era (1736-1796),
theory faced skepticism and rejection from official quarters, leading to a significant crisis for this traditional positioning system. With the eastward spread of Western learning, modern European astronomical and geographical knowledge were introduced into China, and Chinese intellectuals began to favor the Western system of latitude and longitude for geographical positioning. In the late Qing period, the gradual popularization of the spherical Earth concept and the latitude and longitude system laid the theoretical foundation for establishing of this system. The public dissemination of latitude and longitude data measured by the imperial astronomical and calendrical institutions, along with mathematicians’ calculations based on historical data and the supplementary measurements conducted by local governments, provided data support for the system’s establishment. By the end of the Qing dynasty, as the knowledge structures and worldviews of Chinese intellectuals transformed, the traditional celestial-terrestrial correspondence in Chinese local gazetteers was phased out, giving way to the latitude and longitude system.
Journal Article
Placing names : enriching and integrating gazetteers
\"Well before the innovation of maps, gazetteers served as the main geographic referencing system for hundreds of years. Consisting of a specialized index of place names, gazetteers traditionally linked descriptive elements with topographic features and coordinates. Placing Names is inspired by that tradition of discursive place-making and by contemporary approaches to digital data management that have revived the gazetteer and guided its development in recent decades. Adopted by researchers in the Digital Humanities and Spatial Sciences, gazetteers provide a way to model the kind of complex cultural, vernacular, and perspectival ideas of place that can be located in texts and expanded into an interconnected framework of naming history. This volume brings together leading and emergent scholars to examine the history of the gazetteer, its important role in geographic information science, and its use to further the reach and impact of spatial reasoning into the digital age\"-- Back cover.
Book
Bringing places from the distant past to the present: a report on the World Historical Gazetteer
This article is a report about the progress and current status of the World Historical Gazetteer (whgazetteer.org) (WHG) in the context of its value for helping to organize and record digital and paleographic information. It summarizes the development and functionality of the WHG as a software platform for connecting specialist collections of historical place names. It also reviews the idea of places as entities (rather than simple objects with single labels). It also explains the utility of gazetteers in digital library infrastructure and describes potential future developments.
Journal Article
Castes of Mind
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization.
Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus.
Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
eBook
Historical data as a baseline for conservation: reconstructing long-term faunal extinction dynamics in Late Imperial–modern China
Extinction events typically represent extended processes of decline that cannot be reconstructed using short-term studies. Long-term archives are necessary to determine past baselines and the extent of human-caused biodiversity change, but the capacity of historical datasets to provide predictive power for conservation must be assessed within a robust analytical framework. Local Chinese gazetteers represent a more than 400-year country-level dataset containing abundant information on past environmental conditions and include extensive records of gibbons, which have a restricted present-day distribution but formerly occurred across much of China. Gibbons show pre-twentieth century range contraction, with significant fragmentation by the mid-eighteenth century and population loss escalating in the late nineteenth century. Isolated gibbon populations persisted for about 40 years before local extinction. Populations persisted for longer at higher elevations, and disappeared earlier from northern and eastern regions, with the biogeography of population loss consistent with the contagion model of range collapse in response to human demographic expansion spreading directionally across China. The long-term Chinese historical record can track extinction events and human interactions with the environment across much longer timescales than are usually addressed in ecology, contributing novel baselines for conservation and an increased understanding of extinction dynamics and species vulnerability or resilience to human pressures.
Journal Article