Suchergebnisse

PurposeNew (post‐1949) Chinese local gazetteers are one of the major primary resources for contemporary China Studies in the field of history, social sciences, humanities and sciences. Major research libraries in North America have collected them; however, the research value of this series of publications has not yet fully explored. This paper aims at examining how new local gazetteers have been compiled, the scope of their content and research value, and how scholars have used them.Design/methodology/approachThe paper explores the scope and importance of the new Chinese local gazetteers collection through reviewing relevant regulations, policies and guidelines regarding compilation of the new local gazetteers, and randomly examining over 30 provincial, city and county gazetteers.FindingsThe paper provides a detailed account of publishing history of this collection; rich and unique research information available; and approaches to collection development, including utilizing digitized gazetteers by Chinese governments.Originality/valueThe paper explores the development of new Chinese local gazetteers in a more systematic way and adds to the current literature on the unique research value this collection has to offer.

Since the early 1990s an increasing number of villages in China have published local histories known as cunzhi. While village gazetteers can be seen as an extension of the centuries-old difangzhi tradition, unlike other gazetteers, the state neither requires nor formally regulates gazetteer publication at the village level. This article discusses the compilation process and content of village gazetteers with special attention given to politics in the Maoist period. Based on an examination of nearly 140 village gazetteers, the article also discusses how village gazetteers may assist scholars interested in conducting grassroots-level research on post-1949 China. (China J/GIGA)

Revised edition of the 1880 District Manual compiled by H.B. Grigg.

Gazetteers are dictionaries of geographic place-names that have important implications far beyond the worlds of geographers and cartographers. By containing 'definitive' lists of places, gazetteers have the ontological power to define what will and will not be geocoded and represented in databases, maps, search engines, and ultimately our spatial understandings of place. This paper focuses attention on GeoNames, which is the world's largest freely available and widely used gazetteer. We illustrate how content in GeoNames is characterised by highly uneven spatial distributions. There are dense clusters of place-names in some parts of the world and a relative absence of geographic content in others. These patterns are related not just to the wealth and population size of a country, but also to its policies on Internet access and open data. The paper then traces some of the specific implications of this information inequality: showing how biases in gazetteers are propagated in a variety of geographic meaning-making.