Introducing the First Digital Gazetteer of Early Modern London! Author Kim McLean-Fiander Author Janelle Jenstad Encoder Kim McLean-Fiander Copy Editor Janelle Jenstad Data Manager Tye Landels Junior Programmer Joey Takeda Programmer Martin Holmes Associate Project Director Kim McLean-Fiander Project Director Janelle Jenstad The Map of Early Modern Londonhttp://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/includes.xmlVictoria, BC, Canada
Department of English P.O.Box 3070 STNC CSC University of Victoria Victoria, BC Canada V8W 3W1
2016University of Victoria978-1-55058-519-3 Janelle Jenstad london@uvic.ca

Copyright held by The Map of Early Modern London on behalf of the contributors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Further details of licences are available from our Licences page. For more information, contact the project director, Janelle Jenstad, for specific information on the availability and licensing of content found in files on this site.

Born digital.

Most MoEML documents, or significant fragments with xml:id attributes, can be addressed using the mol: prefix and accessed through the web application with their id + .xml.

The molagas prefix points to the shape representation of a location on MoEML’s OpenLayers3-based rendering of the Agas Map.

Links to page-images in the Chadwyck-Healey Early English Books Online (EEBO) repository. Note that this is a subscription service, and may not be accessible to those accessing it from locations outside member institutions.

Links to page-images in the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA).

The mdt (MoEML Document Type) prefix used on catRef/target points to a central taxonomy in the includes file.

The mdtlist (MoEML Document Type listing) prefix used in linking attributes points to a listings page constructed from a category in the central MDT taxonomy in the includes file. There are two variants, one with the plain xml:id of the category, meaning all documents in the specified category, and one with the suffix _subcategories, meaning all subcategories of the category.

The molgls (MoEML gloss) prefix used on term/corresp points to a a glossary entry in the GLOSS1.xml file.

This molvariant prefix is used on ref/target attributes during automated generation of gazetteer index files. It points to an element in the generated variant spellings listing file which lists all documents which contain a particular spelling variant for a location.

This molajax prefix is used on ref/target attributes during the static build process, to specify links which point to MoEML resources which should not be loaded into the source page during standalone processing; instead, these should be turned into links to the XML source documents, and at HTML page load time, these should be turned into AJAX calls. This is to handle the scenario in which a page such as an A-Z index of the whole site would end up containing virtually the whole site inside itself.

The molstow prefix is used on facs attributes to link to the HCMC verison of the Stow facsimiles. Usually the first group is the year (1633) and then last is the image number (0001).

The molshows prefix is used on facs attributes to link to the copies of page-images from mayoral shows stored in the london account on the HCMC server. The first group is the year (1633), the second is the source repository, and then last is the image file name.

The sb prefix is used on ref/target attributes to link to Stow’s Books URLs at UToronto.

Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.

 Standardized respStmts for JENS1, MCFI1, and HOLM3 and added TAKE1 as Junior Programmer. Added XInclude for listPrefixDef in the header. Created the XML flie and published the blog post. Introducing the First Digital Gazetteer of Early Modern London! 20 June 2014
The MoEML Gazetteer

We are very excited to announce the launch of the MoEML Gazetteer of Early Modern London, conceived by Project Director, Janelle Jenstad, and Programmer, Martin Holmes. To the best of our knowledge, until now there has been no authority list for placenames in early modern London. So, after years of researching and tagging London toponyms (i.e., placenames) from a wide range of texts, including John Stow’s Survey of London, poetry, prose, and the lord mayor’s shows, we have accumulated a vast amount of data, and have repurposed it to share it with others in the form of an easy-to-use gazetteer. With links directly to MoEML’s Encyclopedia, our digital gazetteer is also effectively a descriptive gazetteer.

The MoEML gazetteer will be helpful in any number of ways to researchers, editors, scholars of onomastics (the study of the origin of proper names), and projects working with geographical data. Most importantly, it provides both a single authority name and single XML:id for a particular placename, and aggregates all of that placename’s variants, including both variant spellings and alternate names. Further details about the gazetteer and how to use it are available here.

If, for example, you come across a placename called Guthurouns lane in your research, you can click on the letter G in the alphabetical index at the top of the MoEML gazetteer and search (using CTRL + F) on the page for your particular spelling. You will find an entry for your spelling variant that offers you the following six components of information: 1) The Toponym Variant (i.e., the spelling variant for which you are searching); 2) the Authority Name (i.e., the modern-spelling standardized name); 3) the MoEML XML:id (i.e., a unique XML:id assigned to that place by MoEML); 4) the Agas Map coordinates (i.e., where that place is located on the Agas map); 5) All Variants (i.e., all alternate names and variant spellings for that place aggregated from across the entire MoEML project); and 6) the Location Category (i.e., whether the place is a street, site, church, hall, playhouse, tavern, etc.). You will discover, for instance, that the authority name for Guthurouns lane is actually Gutter Lane, that the unique MoEML XML:id is GUTT1, that it is a street, and that it is located on tile B5 of our Agas map. You will also be able to see all the variant spellings (in this case ten) for that particular placename.

Toponym Variant: Guthurouns lane, Authority Name: Gutter Lane

If, during your own research, you encounter a variant for an early modern London placename that we have not yet included in the gazetteer, email us, and we’ll add it. The more name variants the gazetteer includes — whether variant spellings or alternate names — the more useful it will be as a scholarly tool.

We hope that researchers and other projects will consider adopting MoEML’s authority names and authority XML:ids, as this will allow for greater interoperabilitiy across projects. At present, the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) tags London toponyms in Shakespeare’s plays using MoEML’s XML:ids. This allows MoEML to harvest or point to mention of any placename in an ISE text. (To see how this works, click on Cheapside here and scroll to the very bottom of the article to see where this placename is mentioned in the ISE. If you click on the ISE quotation mentioning Cheapside, you will leave the MoEML website and be taken to that quotation in the ISE project’s website. This is a fine example of digital project interoperability!)

Eventually, we plan to include latitude and longitude coordinates (in addition to Agas Map coordinates) for as many entries in the MoEML gazetteer as possible. Thus, another possible use for the gazetteer would be for other projects to embed it as a geocoding tool on their websites. If you have a large data set and/or want to use our gazetteer for data mining toponyms, contact Project Director, Janelle Jenstad.

Placenames have long been of interest to scholars of language, history, and onomastics, as they reflect the transformation of a space (an area) into a place (an area that has become meaningful as a result of human activity or observation). The MoEML gazetteer will allow researchers to encounter the spaces and places of early modern London in new, different, and useful ways. We hope you benefit from using it!