Pelagios in the Indian Subcontinent
Recording Place-Names
Since our last post, we have been focusing on the annotation of colonial maps created between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in colonial India. If you’d like to find out more about the project, and why we are annotating these maps, click here to read our first post.
So far, we have annotated six maps of British, French and Dutch origin, ranging in date from 1714 through to 1894, with a total of 1,931 annotations, the vast majority of which relate to settlements. Maps of British and French origin are the most readily available, with some Dutch, and even fewer Portuguese and Danish maps easily accessible online. As our chronology mostly covers the period of British and French occupation, this doesn’t pose too much of a problem. However, tracking changes that include the early colonies of Portugal, Denmark and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century alongside those of the British and French could offer a richer insight into the evolution of place-names over the full span of India’s colonial history.
The key information we wish to track across the corpus of maps is the transliteration and translation of place-names. The same place-names appear with spelling variations but also with completely different names depending on the map’s date and place of publication, as in the example below of Chandegry, also known as Bisnagar or Narsing:
Given more time, and with a larger corpus, it could also be interesting to track the symbology used for these place-names across maps of different origin. You can often find the same, or similar, symbology maintained across maps — take the example of Chandegry/Bisnagar/Narsing above, which is shown with a similar temple symbol in both cases. The example below of Valdaour/Valdour, on the other hand, shows three different symbols across three maps: two show a basic symbol (either a circle or a circle with a marker) whereas the other shows a representation of a fort, giving us more information about the place.
Tracking symbol types, and symbol hierarchies, across maps of different chronologies and origins could offer an insight into the ways in which different powers viewed key locations at key points in the tumultuous history of colonial India.
For now, we are focusing on the place-names themselves. Whilst a number of the place-names which feature on these maps can easily be located with modern gazetteers (we are using GeoNames, built into the Recogito interface), a greater number cannot be identified automatically as the place-name spellings have either morphed or completely changed.
The following image shows the 1894 map of ‘Madras (South), Mysore, and Coorg’ annotated within Recogito, with the region of Mysore highlighted within the interface:
There are 784 annotations on this map in total. Around 80 of these refer to geographic features or regions (and therefore do not have specifically assigned coordinates), and the remainder are settlements. Of these settlements, around 280 place-names could be automatically assigned coordinates using the GeoNames gazetteer (with a manual check). These locations can be seen in the screenshot below:
This leaves us with around 400 place-names that require more involved disambiguation. Whilst the other five maps we have annotated so far have do not have quite so many place-names, the ratio of those that can and cannot be automatically assigned coordinates is very similar. Ultimately, then, we will be left with a rich (and challenging) dataset of place-names which require disambiguation and the assignment of coordinates.
We will soon complete annotation and begin this disambiguation process, focusing on specific regions/areas in order to create a gazetteer which demonstrates the evolution of place-names between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in India.
If you have any questions related to this project, please get in touch with Deborah Sutton (d.sutton[at]lancaster.ac.uk, @DebsSutton) or Katherine Bellamy (k.a.bellamy[at]lancaster.ac.uk, @kbellamy_)
