Introducing Kima: The Hebrew Gazetteer

What are the key toponyms in ancient Hebrew, as opposed to those of Modern Hebrew? When did פוסטאט become קהיר, or לעמברג become לבוב and what was the relation of these changes to the political history of those places?

Hebrew place names are a complex, problematic and fascinating phenomenon. Centuries of Jewish diasporic existence projected its own coordinate system on the map of the world. Hebrew languages interacted with local contemporaneous place names whenever and wherever Jewish people dwelled. Diverging cultural, Halachic and liturgical traditions created toponymic categories at once anchored in geography and mutable by temporal and cultural dimensions. Efforts to record, map and virtually reconstruct these spaces are abound, and yet, the resources collected were hitherto not available as open and linked Geographical data, to which the surviving cornucopia of historical Hebrew script texts, periodica and literature, could be connected.

KIMA sets the grounds for a comprehensive, dynamic and interoperable database of historical place names in languages written in the Hebrew Script. It is unique in being based on textual attestations, thus enabling beyond the study, visualization and use of changing historical placenames, also a thorough study of placenames as a linguistic, discursive phenomenon. The gazetteer will be integrated with the Pelagios Commons annotation and mapping environment, Recogito and will provide a stable and shared reference for linking place names in digitized resources.