This document discusses the Digital Exposure of English Place-Names project. It notes that the project has digitized over 80 years of scholarship on English place-names, including 32 counties, 86 volumes, over 6 million place-name forms, and thousands of bibliographic references. It explains that place-names are dynamic, attested, contested, and documented entities that require crowd-sourcing to correct errors, validate data, add missing geographic information, and enrich point data with additional details. The document also announces a new scoping study to research crowd-sourcing models for enriching humanities data.

1. The Digital Exposure of English
Place-names
Stuart Dunn
Department of Digital Humanities
Kings College London
7th March 2012
http://englishplacenames.cerch.kcl.ac.uk

2. Place names
• Dynamic
• Attested
•Contested
• Documented and...

3. ...Researched
Photos courtesy of Jo Walsh

4. DEEP in numbers
• 80 years of scholarship
• 32 English counties
• 86 volumes
• 6157 elements
• 30,517 pages
• c 4,000,000 individual place-name forms
• ??? Bibliographic references (we will know soon – it’s quite a lot)

5. Contested
interpretations and
etymologies

6. Dates/references

7. Previous work: CHALICE pilot

8. Current work (in progress)

9. Our approach to geography: a point-based historic
gazetteer

10. Our approach to geography: a point-based historic
gazetteer

11. Points, lines and polygons are problematic!
•Pre-OS there is very little data on geographic
associations of place-names
(http://chalice.blogs.edina.ac.uk/files/2011/06/VCH_FI
NAL1.pdf) Hadrian’s Wall
Roman
•Points are arbitrary bridgehead
dependent on scale
Modern
• Administrative course of R.
Irthing
geographies change over
time
• Even natural features
can mislead

13. We need crowd sourcing to:
•Correct errors/omissions in the NLP
•Validate our output with local knowledge
•Add geographic data where it is lacking
(e.g. field names)
• Identify crossovers with users of other
sources (e.g. VCH)
• Enrich our point data with raster and string
data
• More about sourcing communities than
crowds

14. New project!
• AHRC-funded scoping study under Connected
Communities
• Feb-November 2012
• Research crowd-sourcing models for the
humanities
• 2 expert seminars
• Develop a typology of crowd-sourcing methods
• Report/roadmap
stuart.dunn@kcl.ac.uk mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk