In my talk, I will present a set of spatial data which was created during a digitisation project conducted in 2022-2023 in the National Library of Finland. For now, it is a corpus consisting of place names from the 15th century manuscript work of Ptolemaic maps, some 5000 in total, recorded in the bibliographic record of each map (the manuscript record: https://kansalliskirjasto.finna.fi/Record/fikka.5621944). My aim is to invite scholars to develop and make use of the data and suggest some ways of georeferencing the places in the maps.

The maps can be browsed, and the place names can be searched in the library database kansalliskirjasto.finna.fi. The digitised maps are available on the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi platform. Both services, Finna and digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi, provide an API interface that enables processing of the data. (for details, see https://api.finna.fi/swagger-ui/?url=%2Fapi%2Fv1%3Fswagger#/Record/get_record and https://wiki.helsinki.fi/xwiki/bin/view/Comhis/Comhis/Interfaces%20of%20digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/).

The work is titled at some point Cosmographia, and it consists of 27 maps drawn after Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia Hyphegesis. The manuscript was most probably produced by Nicolaus Germanus’ (ca. 1420-ca. 1490) workshop in Florence during the late 15th century. The maps are bound together with a work La sfera by a Florentine merchant and humanist Gregorio Dati. Both works in this manuscript, Cosmographia and La sfera, are products of the same hand and the same workshop. The work including the maps has raised only minimal scholarly attention. In 2014, Chet Van Duzer published an article focusing on the non-Ptolemaic legends added to the maps (“Bring on the Monsters and Marvels: Non-Ptolemaic Legends on Manuscript Maps of Ptolemy’s Geography”, in Viator 45: 303-334; https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.103923). He makes comparisons with other copies from the same period in other collections. Before him, there were no studies which would have been focused on the maps of the manuscript. The work of Dati has been an interest of only a few as well.

According to van Duzer, the maps in this manuscript belong to the first group of the three of Ptolemies produced in Florence by Nicolaus Germanus and his workshop. These maps are less luxurious copies than the other known copies in other public collections. However, in the maps in question here, there is an unusually high amount of added information on the maps: legends and place names. This feature seems to be almost unique. There are both Ptolemaic and non-Ptolemaic place names, meaning that they derive from Ptolemy’s text and from other sources. In addition to the place names, there are short mentions and longer explanations about exotic animals, mythical monsters and peoples, among other subjects.

Therefore, the corpus of the place names was created among the digitisation project mentioned earlier. While the metadata of each map was created by cataloguing them in MARC21 format in the library database, all the place names and legends were extracted from maps as well. This resulted 27 bibliographic records of the category map, with a large amount of the field 522, that is, a note on geographical coverage. The highest amount of place names, over 600, was recorded in the map of Asia minor (https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=37&marc=true ). Also, the maps of Hispania, Greece, Italy, and another one of Asia minor, are dense with spatial information. Not surprisingly, the smallest number of place names, 80 in total, was recorded on the map of Tabrobana insula (https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=59&marc=true ). Around 100 place names were also recorded on two maps depicting Sarmatia, the regions today around and north from the Black Sea, Azov Sea, and Caspian Sea (https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=39&marc=true and https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/teos/binding/2767605?page=39&marc=true ).

These maps have not been georeferenced to correspond modern digital map bases. In my talk, I will ask which ways of georeferencing would be expedient in the case of early modern manuscript maps. My suggestion is that an ontology or thesaurus would be created, which would preserve the historical dimension of named places. This would enable multiple and interdisciplinary spatio-temporal analysis. Enriching the vocabulary with coordinates, languages, time periods, and other linked information, such as Wikidata and other thesauri (Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Place Names https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/index.html), would allow studies not limited only to spatial humanities but also for instance language studies or onomastics, as well as other quantitative and qualitative studies. Therefore, my paper is an invitation for researchers to take advantage of these maps and to encourage to exploit the spatial data collected, that is, the geographical terms.

Today, the manuscript belongs to the Nordenskiöld Collection, which was collected by scholar and explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in late 19th century. The collection consists of early cartography and maps, and literature on geography, history, and travel. The result of the digitisation project mentioned in the beginning is a digital collection of the so-called Ptolemy Atlases, of which constitute an almost complete series of printed Ptolemies from 15th and 16th centuries. (see https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/collections?id=821&set_language=en) This collection provides plenty of other opportunities for spatial humanities as well.

A blog post of the project will soon be available on https://www.kansalliskirjasto.fi/fi/blogi.