Toponymy and Technology

Abstract

During the time I was administering Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) contracts in the University of New Mexico Barth Data Analysis Center (BDAC), my mother once took me aside and in a confidential, almost conspiratorial voice, asked, Bob, what do you do? That was the question my colleagues at BDAC often asked as well. BOAC was primarily a GIS shop but also did a lot of image processing, as well as other very high-tech geographic projects. All anyone knew about GNIS was that the equipment it required was from the technological Pleistocene. Thus, they viewed GNIS as irrelevant. At staff meetings I used the word as often as possible, but I fooled no one; I wasn't manipulating bytes and pixels; I was working with names. A quaint but sometimes interesting oddity. But over time that subtly began to change. The GIS people noticed first. They discovered that GNIS wasn't just a bunch of names; as a database it could become a data layer in their GIS's. What's more, it resided not in books and on maps, as name information traditionally had, but on computers and could be transmitted electronically. Almost overnight, I acquired new respect, because names had made the transition from words to data. And· this has led me to ponder this rather momentous shift in the evolution of toponymy. It was a quarter century ago that I first became involved in toponymy, a word foreign to me at the time. I was editing and managing a little weekly newspaper in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire, and because the business, which included a tiny printing plant, long ago had published a small booklet about the region's myths and legends that still generated revenue from the tourist trade, I reasoned that another booklet might generate still more revenue. But a new booklet about what? Well, the region was filled with interesting, curiosity-compelling place names-why not a booklet about them?