Turning Place Names into Digital Maps

Often, you might end up with a set of place names, perhaps associated with data, and no clear way to get this into a form usable by a computer. Fixing this is one example of the process called geocoding. Geocoding can sound complicated, but is really just a way of associating things with places.

There are multiple ways to get from this to a set of co-ordinates. One way is simply to look up each place’s co-ordinates. If you only have a handful of places, and they align relatively well with modern places, Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap can be good sources for this. Then, a latitude and longitude column in a spreadsheet is all that is needed to import this data into most mapping software.

This approach doesn’t take account of changing place names, places no longer existing, or a set of places so large as to make finding each individual set of co-ordinates too laborious. In these cases, using a gazetteer can be helpful. These are sets of co-ordinates connected to place names, either historical or contemporary.

For example, the World Historical Gazetteer is a web-based collection of historical place names and their geographical locations. As this is a web-based tool, it doesn’t require programming knowledge, and it encourages contributions from other researchers as Linked Open Data. For more information on using the World Historical Gazetteer, see the excellent Programming Historian tutorial by Susan Grunewald and Andrew Grunewald.

Once you have a gazetteer of places, you can move on to making maps and other visualisations based on this data. This is also a research output in its own right. If you have made your own gazetteer, you may want to consider making this an Open Access resource, either through the World Historical Gazetteer or some other way.