Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
prefectures and over a thousand counties, which were repeatedly split
and merged as circumstances dictated. Developing a historical gazeteer
and performing historical spatial analysis is the way to model and visual-
ize the geography and temporality of sovereignty.
Digital Gazetteer Development and the
Digital Gazetteer as a Source for History
An empirical approach to the spatial history of Song state power requires
a way to manage information about thousands of individual place-mak-
ing events that occurred over hundreds of years. In order to accomplish
that, we organized the DGSD around named places and their atributes.
The DGSD records information about all of the provincial circuits, pre-
fectures, counties, and towns that existed at any time during the Song
dynasty and all of the occasions when they were promoted, demoted,
split, merged, or renamed or when they changed jurisdictions. It also
includes information about population, markets, garrisons, and other
atributes that Song authors associated with administrative units. Orga-
nized around the histories of named places, the DGSD is optimized for
discovering and visualizing both spatial and temporal paterns.
In 1958 Sinologist Hope Wright completed a work entitled
An Alpha-
betical List of Geographical Names in Sung China.
Originally published
in Paris by the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the ́cole Pratique
des Hautes ́tudes and reprinted as a second-generation photocopy in
1992 by the
Journal of Song-Yuan Studies,
the
Alphabetical List
is now out
of print. Wright's compilation is the most comprehensive print source
for Song geography in any language. The
Alphabetical List
is an index to
every jurisdiction in the Song spatial administrative hierarchy named
in one or more of the following three Song texts: the
Song History
(
宋史
Song shi
) geography monograph, the 980
Records of the Universal Realm
in the Taiping Era
(
太平寰宇紀
Taiping huanyu ji
), and the 1085
Tre a t i s e
on the Nine Territories in the Yuanfeng Reign
(
元豐九域志
Yuanfeng jiuyu
zhi
).
4
The DGSD is a MySQL database derived primarily from the
Alpha-
betical List.
We used a Chinese data entry service to digitize the print
Alphabetical List
into an MS Word document. Next we converted that
