Ruth Mostern

University of Pittsburgh, History, Faculty Member

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Papers by Ruth Mostern

Specifics of the Motion Picture Industry

World-Historical Gazetteer Research Report

Journal of World-Historical Information

World-Historical Gazetteer Research Report Human activity takes place in space, but it does not t... more World-Historical Gazetteer Research Report Human activity takes place in space, but it does not transpire on an abstract Cartesian grid. Rather, it happens in locations to which people ascribe meaning, which they often do by assigning names to those places. A gazetteer is a specialized index of place names. Developing a historical gazetteer can be a complex undertaking, since the same place may have many names over time, and it may well have multiple names at the same time. Its geometry may change and its spatial extent may be uncertain. It may need to be described according to terms that are multiple, contested, and evolving. Considered globally, places have names in multiple languages and scripts as well. For all of these reasons, gazetteers are important reference works. For digital projects and data integration tasks, they are absolutely essential. However, because it is so difficult to develop a historical gazetteer, most of the existing ones are quite specialized. For years, the spatial history community has sought to find a way to develop a single gazetteer of world-historical scope or a network of many interrelated and interoperable specialized gazetteers. With this report, I am pleased to notify the community that I have recently been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to do so.

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Geographic Search: Catalogs, Gaze Eers, and Maps

ftrf.org

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Putting the World In World History

In studying the history of any great campaign, such as Caesar&#x27;s Gallic Wars, a very good... more

Geographic Search: Catalogs, Gazetteers, and Maps

College & Research …, Jan 1, 2007

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FROM BATTLEFIELDS TO COUNTIES: WAR, BORDER, AND STATE POWER IN SOUTHERN SONG HUAINAN

Battlefronts real and imagined: war, border, and …, Jan 1, 2008

CHAPTER 8 FROM BATTLEFIELDS TO COUNTIES: WAR, BORDER, AND STATE POWER IN SOUTHERN SONG HUAINAN Ru... more

Geographical Information and Historical Research: Current Progress and Future Directions

HISTORY AND …, Jan 1, 2001

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From Named Place to Naming Event: Creating Gazetteers for History

International Journal of Geographical …, Jan 1, 2008

For historians and other scholars of the human past, gazetteers are best seen as records of event... more

Historical Gazetteers: An Experiential Perspective, With Examples From Chinese History

Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and …, Jan 1, 2008

Historians and other humanists interested in modeling the spatiality of past places should consid... more

Amid the Clouds and Mist: China's Colonization of Guizhou, 12001700 (Review)

Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, Jan 1, 2010

Amid the Clouds and Mist: China's Colonization of Guizhou, 12001700 By John E. Herman. Da... more

A View From Cyberspace: The Silk Road Atlas of the Electronic

Publication of the Central Eurasian Studies Society

The Digital Gazetteer of Song Dynasty China, Version 1.1

Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, Jan 1, 2010

ABSTRACT In 1958, Sinologist Hope Wright published a work entitled An Alphabetical List of Geogra... more ABSTRACT In 1958, Sinologist Hope Wright published a work entitled An Alphabetical List of Geographical Names in Sung China. Originally published in Paris by the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and reprinted as a second-generation photocopy in 1992 by the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, the Alphabetical List is now out of print. The Alphabetical List is an index to every jurisdiction in the Song (960–1276) spatial administrative hierarchy named in one or more of the following three Song texts: the Song shi dili zhi 宋史地理志 [Song History, Geography Monograph], the 980 太平寰宇紀 Taiping huanyu ji [Records of the Universal Realm in the Taiping Era], and the 1085 Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi 元豐九域志 [Treatise on the Nine Territories in the Yuanfeng Reign]. Wright’s compilation is the most comprehensive print source for Song geography in any language. The Digital Gazetteer of Song Dynasty China (DGSD) is a MySQL database derived primarily from the Alphabetical List. The Alphabetical List consists of 4,009 headwords, including all Rank One circuits (路 lu), Rank Two prefectures (府 fu, 州 zhou, 軍 jun, and 監 jian), Rank Three counties (縣 xian) and county-rank jun and jian, and Rank Four towns (鎮 zhen) and garrisons (sai 塞 and bao 堡) that existed at any time during the Song dynasty, along with centers of state industry (mines, foundries, and commodity markets) located in prefectures, and information about the number of cantons (鄉 xiang) in each county, the resident (zhu 住) and guest (客 ke) population of each prefecture in 980 and 1085, the civil rank of each prefecture and county, the designation of counties that served as prefecture seats, the military-ceremonial designation, if any, of each prefecture, the latitude-longitude coordinate of each prefecture, and the distance of each county from the seat of its parent prefecture. The DGSD transforms all of this information into a flexible, extensible, georeferenced, and queryable format. I developed the DGSD in collaboration with my graduate student Elijah Meeks, with partial funding from the Society for Song-Yuan Studies. It supports my book Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of State Power in Song Dynasty China (960–1276ce) (Harvard University Asia Center, forthcoming). The book demonstrates how the Song court repeatedly reorganized the structure of counties and prefectures in order to distribute civil and military officials around the empire in accordance with changing priorities. Therefore, the DGSD is designed to identify the events that transformed the political landscape, and to make the histories of often fluid places as accessible as the names of the jurisdictions themselves. The DGSD is a genre of database known as a digital gazetteer. The term gazetteer generates some confusion in Chinese studies, since it is the English word most commonly used to gloss the Chinese local geographies known as 地方志 difangzhi. As the expression is used by geographers, a gazetteer refers to a place name directory, like the list at the back of an atlas. In a networked computing environment, gazetteers refer to databases organized around named places and their locations, and they have become essential to all spatial search infrastructure. A gazetteer is distinct from a geographic information system (GIS), although the two are often used together and frequently translated into one another. A gazetteer is a database about named places, while a GIS is a system for storing, analyzing and displaying georeferenced information. The DGSD is freely available for download at http://songgis.ucmercedlibrary.info/ . It is also being peer reviewed and made available by the China Historical GIS (CHGIS) at http://fas.harvard.edu/~chgis . The website also includes release notes and presentations, which provide additional information about the DGSD and the research I have conducted with it, sample GIS shapefiles derived from the DGSD, and illustrative maps and charts. If you use the database in any published work, please cite it as: Ruth Mostern and Elijah Meeks, “Digital Gazetteer of Song Dynasty China v.1.0” (2009). Please send feedback and information about your use of the DGSD to Ruth Mostern ([email protected]).

Spatial Vagueness and Uncertainty In the Computational Humanities

geokemp.net

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Application of geographical gazetteer standards to named time periods

Apprehending the Realm: Territoriality and Political Power in Song China, 960-1276 CE

ABSTRACT Thesis (Ph. D. in History)--University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2003. Includes bibl... more

Dividing the realm in order to govern the spatial organization of the song state (hardback)

Livre: Dividing the realm in order to govern the spatial organization of the song state (hardback... more

Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State

Livre: Dividing the realm in order to govern the spatial organization of the song state (hardback... more

" Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern": The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE)

Livre: Dividing the realm in order to govern the spatial organization of the song state (hardback... more

Cartography on the Song Frontier: Making and Using Maps in the SongXi Xia Conflict

第 3 届中国科技典籍国际会议论文集, Jan 1, 2006