From named place to naming event: creating gazetteers for history

For historians and other scholars of the human past, gazetteers are best seen as records of events in the histories of places, rather than as indexes of named places per se. This paper discusses the episodic nature of historical temporality, the narrative form of reasoning in history, and the value of using events as the basis for gazetteers in order to reflect the character of knowledge about historical places. It identifies the attributes of a historical event and introduces the idea that a historical event gazetteer must build networks of relationships among events in order to effectively represent historical narrative. It reviews relevant bodies of literature and proposes a procedure for identifying chronological, mereological, and causal relationships among historical events. Finally, it suggests new directions in spatiotemporal visualization of history, with reference to a prototype developed by the authors.