Presentation (PPT): What are Places?

I will be talking about what places are, and how they are quite different

from geographical features, which are the focus of topographic maps and

the gazetteers derived from them; I will probably mention also

administrative units, and how these differ from both places and features.

Most basically, features exist in the physical landscape, units in law,

and places in consciousness and discourse. One basic problem is that

traditional map making methods were able to gather place information, not

with theodolites but because surveyors could talk to people, and were

tasked to gather place information from them; but modern aerial survey

methods are completely useless. Crowd-sourcing is in some way the perfect

tool for gathering modern place information, but sites such as Flickr and

Geonames seem to mainly record perceptions of tourists rather than truly

local knowledge. My main concern, however, is with historical gazetteers,

where we have the larger problem that the crowd is dead. Rather than

getting into obscure historical examples, I will be mostly discussing

London pubs, and the second worst place in modern Britain.

I will be referring to this recent paper, ³On Historical Gazetteers², in

the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing:

http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ijhac.2011.0028