DH Seminar: The City and the Archive. Historical gazetteers from empires to monuments

Historical gazetteers are becoming an increasingly important resource in the digital humanities. Assigning a specific identifier to each historical place, they enable connections and comparisons between documents that share the same place references. In this talk we will argue the value of enhancing the granularity of gazetteers, bringing them within the walls of historical cities, creating identifiers for single buildings and recording the evolution of their lives, including variant names, changes of purpose and major restorations. We will present urban gazetteers as both tools to enhance digital connectivity and research outputs in their own right. Building-specific identifiers will help in creating and exploring connections between documents such as museum catalogues, digital archives, architectural blueprints, 3D models and other renderings more precisely and effectively, thus facilitating digital unification. But urban gazetteers are also collaborative and authoritative online records about urban built heritage, which condense and make more readily available our complex knowledge of ever-changing cities.