Gazetteers can help historians with mapping toponyms that appear in the sources they analyse by providing them with lists of historical place names and extra information which can be used to disambiguate the latter, if it happens that several different places share a same name. This is the aim of initiatives such as the World Historical Gazetteer or Pleiades. However, despite their merits, the international scope of these tools impedes the use for regional and local historical research. Historians thus need more suitable gazetteers if they want to work at a more local scale.
CLARIAH-VL aims to fill in this gap for Belgium by launching the project “Belgian Historical Gazetteer” in the framework of its SIC “Enrich”. Started in November 2022, the pilot of this project will last two years, and eventually aims to cover the whole country in the coming years. It is hosted at the University of Antwerp and undertaken in liaison with the Belgian National Geographical Institute (IGN/NGI). The aim of this project is to set up a historical gazetteer of toponyms for the whole present-day territory of Belgium, in order to provide researchers with a collection of data that 1) does not stop at Belgian provincial borders 2) goes beyond the level of municipalities and 3) goes back in time as much as possible.
Pilot test
The first phase of the project (pilot 2022/2024) consists in the gathering of an ancient and geographically homogeneous set of toponyms for provinces Antwerp, East Flanders and Liège. This is done by collecting all the toponyms mentioned on the ‘reduced cadastre’, a reduced version of the primitive cadastre drawn between 1847 and 1855 to prepare the creation of the first topographical map of Belgium in the second half of the 19th century.
From QGis to Linked Open Data
These toponyms are located by using points in QGis and described via the PostGis extension in a PostgreSQL database whose structure is highly adaptable to every source and compatible with Linked Open Data principles. For each toponym we record not only its name, location, type (as described in the source, and a standardized version of it), but also if applicable its matching number in databases of other projects (for instance the “placename” project of the State Archives, the “Dorpskernen” project for Flemish toponyms), its corresponding Wikidata page if it already exists and its corresponding notice in the book Gemeenten van Belgïe[1], where Hervé Hasquin and his team summarized historical information (notably administrative and ecclesiastical belonging during the Ancien Régime) about municipalities.
The ultimate aim of drawing those links with the existing (notably historical) resources is to provide researchers with sufficient information on each toponyms to facilitate the disambiguation of place names. For instance, if one historian wants to locate a place called “heikant” in the primary source and if it appears that there are several “heikant” in Belgium, it may help him/her to identify the correct one among the latter if he knows in which bishopric each of them belongs in the seventeenth century. Finally, thanks to another table of the database (table “relations”), we also describe elementary relations between the toponyms like the administrative ones (“this hamlet belongs to this town” / “this isolated chapel belongs to this town”).
Future integration and accessibility
At the end of the project, this gazetteer will be published on the World Historical Gazetteer, and will progressively be loaded on Druid (a LOD platform), in order to make it easily reachable for everyone as well as potentially extendable. This gazetteer will enable researchers to easily identify place names they find in their sources, and could be used in the future to automatically ‘map’ (e.g. annotated) written sources to a great extent.
Beyond these very practical benefits, we think that this Belgian gazetteer can also be used to open new perspectives in landscape history by making it possible to follow the evolution of the Belgian landscape through the evolution of toponyms (name and location) on the long-term. This is why, in a second phase (which in practice is ran parallel to the first), we compare the nineteenth century toponyms with present-day ones using the database of the IGN/NGI. By establishing links between ancient and actual toponyms, we can explore how a toponym evolved during the nineteenth and the twentieth century in order to research variations of place names through time. In a third phase, toponyms extracted from older material will be added to the database and the same sort of links will be described, in order to make it possible to follow the evolution of place name on a longer term.
[1] Duvosquel, Jean-Marie, Hervé Hasquin, and Raymond Van Uytven. Gemeenten Van België: Geschiedkundig En Administratief-Geografisch Woordenboek. Bruxelles: La Renaissance du Livre, 1980.
