Merge pull request #3251 from programminghistorian/Issue-3250

Issue-3250

en/lessons/space-place-gazetteers.md

@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ Many theorists of place describe the concept in historical and temporally dynami
 
 For these scholars, place can never be distinguished from travel, activity, relations of power, and human interaction. With its focus on human activity, meaning, contestation, and change over time, 'place' (the purview of names, lists, descriptions, and gazetteers) is often a more meaningful concept for spatial historians than 'space' (the domain of maps, which cannot easily represent human interaction and meaning). Place is an essential concept for many types of historical analysis, as well as many types of data curation.
 
-The set of values, institutions, and relationships associated with any given locale are multitudinous, dynamic and unstable. A place may change substantially in all its particulars, even as it persists as a spatial entity. Names for places may coexist, or they may succeed each other according to regime changes or major events. Constantinople (also known historically as Lygos, Byzantium, Nova Roma, Rūmiyyat al-Kubra, and many other aliases) took on the name Istanbul after the Ottoman conquest of the city in the fifteenth century, though both names were used officially until 1928. When Dutch settlers colonized the 'hilly island' at the mouth of the Hudson River, which the Native American Lenape residents called Manahatta, they named their settlement Neuwe Amsterdam – this became New York in 1664, after the English took over the Dutch colony. Informally, people might also refer to the city by the 1807 term Gotham, or the 1921 term Big Apple. If they are speaking or writing in Chinese, they would call it Niuyue (纽约).
+The set of values, institutions, and relationships associated with any given locale are multitudinous, dynamic and unstable. A place may change substantially in all its particulars, even as it persists as a spatial entity. Names for places may coexist, or they may succeed each other according to regime changes or major events. Constantinople (also known historically as Lygos, Byzantium, Nova Roma, Rūmiyyat al-Kubra, and many other aliases) took on the name Istanbul after the Ottoman conquest of the city in the fifteenth century, though both names were used officially until 1928. When Dutch settlers colonized the 'hilly island' at the mouth of the Hudson River, which the Native American Lenape residents called Manahatta, they named their settlement Nieuw Amsterdam – this became New York in 1664, after the English took over the Dutch colony. Informally, people might also refer to the city by the 1807 term Gotham, or the 1921 term Big Apple. If they are speaking or writing in Chinese, they would call it Niuyue (纽约).
 
 Conversely, places may retain stable names even as their spatial footprints change: for instance, when rivers break their banks and take new courses, or when metropolitan areas expand their boundaries. Even though the mappable extent of a river may change over time, the river persists as a fixed conceptual entity in the minds of the people who navigate it, reside near it, or read, write, and talk about it. The Yellow River is still the Yellow River even when it is dry, dammed, or flooded. From the perspective of knowledge modeling in a gazetteer database, the river is a single entity, associated with a large cluster of attestations that are specific to certain events and time periods.
 
@@ -89,7 +89,7 @@ These questions are all of special interest to historians. In many cases, a gaze
 
 By this point in the lesson, it should be clear that the most important consideration is to recognize that place is the fundamental entity in any well-designed gazetteer, over and above individual place names, or attestations of the existence of a place at a certain date in a particular source document. 
 
-The author of a historical gazetteer which includes information about New York, the great metropolis situated at the mouth of the Hudson River, would do well to group information about its many names into one complex entity associated with a single ID number: Lenape Manahatta, Dutch Neuwe Amsterdam, British colonial New York, and Washington Irving’s 1807 coinage of Gotham. 
+The author of a historical gazetteer which includes information about New York, the great metropolis situated at the mouth of the Hudson River, would do well to group information about its many names into one complex entity associated with a single ID number: Lenape Manahatta, Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam, British colonial New York, and Washington Irving’s 1807 coinage of Gotham. 
 
 Grouping multiple names and attestations into a single gazetteer record allows for several affordances. First, it turns the gazetteer into a powerful thesaurus. Second, it makes it possible to map as much information as possible onto a single geographical referent. Third, it makes the gazetteer a compelling (and potentially decolonial) work of history which tells a story of sovereignty, colonialism, and culture. Finally, it improves search and discovery, especially in the context of Linked Open Data.