EDINA in team for English place names exploration

Place names form such a ubiquitous and persistent part of our social and cultural landscape that it is easy to forget that they are themselves complex units of information with rich heritages. They contain hidden stories of language, history and culture, which can sometimes be discerned relatively easily, but which more often require specialist knowledge of history and linguistics to be unlocked.

Since 1923, the English Place Name Society (EPNS) has researched, gathered and edited this knowledge, and published it in the form of 87 volumes as the Survey of English Place-names.

These volumes are now being digitised by the JISC-funded Digital Exposure of English Place-names (DEEP) project, a consortium of the Centre for e-Research, Kings College London; EDINA and Language Technology Group (LTG), University of Edinburgh; Centre for Data Digitization and Analysis (CDDA), Queen’s University Belfast; Institute for Name-Studies (INS), University of Nottingham. Individual historic names and information about them are being identified by automated language processing, rendered in XML and mapped to a metadata schema.

A key output will be a gazetteer for EDINA’s Unlock web service, which will allow scholars to use Unlock’s functionality to locate any historic name that the EPNS’s research has found in any digital text. The hidden stories of England’s place names will come a step closer to being available to all.