Digitising the 'Survey of English Place-Names' and generating an online historical gazetteer of English place-names. Funded by JISC. Place-names are not static.
They change and evolve over time, in response to the development of language, wars and conquests, shifting administrative boundaries, or simply the vagaries of spelling in the days before dictionaries and atlases. They have complex etymologies derived from different languages, and they mean different things to different communities. Therefore, historical documents and archives, ephemera and source
s, contain different spellings (forms) of place-names depending on their date and context. However—and despite the fact that we now take for granted the ability to search geographic data using web services such as Google Maps and GeoNames.org—there is no gazetteer documenting these historic name forms. Digitisation, however, offers a solution. In England, the historical developments of place-names over time have been systematically surveyed since 1922 by the specialists of the English Place-Name Society (EPNS). Examining an extensive range of documentary sources in local and national archives, and gathering the knowledge of local communities and experts, the EPNS has built up an 86-volume county by county survey of England’s place-names—detailing over four million variant forms, from classical sources, through the Anglo-Saxon period and into medieval England and beyond to the modern period. This project will digitise the entire 86 volume corpus of the Survey of English Place-Names (SEPN), the ultimate authority on historic place-names in England, and make its 4 million forms available via the JISC-funded Unlock service, along with vigilantly curated crowd-sourced contributions from the expert community. The content will be published in XML, employing a SKOS data model. The platform could thus be generalized to incorporate any other historic digital place-name corpus in the UK or elsewhere, provided it is in digital form, and adheres to appropriate standards.
