onomastics.co.uk

Another great website to be promoted is a young www.onomastics.co.uk 

It "was founded by Alice Crook and Leonie Dunlop  
, two postgraduate students from the University of Glasgow, after it became apparent that this research field was brimming with new ideas but was in need of a place for discussions to take place. At the University of Glasgow, the lunchtime Onomastic Reading Group now meets fortnightly to discuss anything and everything related to the study of names. Over a pot of tea and a sandwich, everything from dog naming patterns in Africa to the Lochleven parish records in Scotland is chewed over. It is due to this enthusiastic bunch that this website came to fruition: with many thanks to Scott McGready, the website’s designer and developer, without whom it would have stayed an idea for a long time! Please put the kettle on and have a cuppa while enjoying browsing the website and joining in lively conversations. We hope this will spur you into attending a place-name walk or conference and will give you a place to keep discussions going in between onomastic events". (from here)

I think it's just wonderful what what they are doing there and in the future it will be very visited and helpful. We wish to Glaswegian onomasticians all the best in their web-onomastic job! Thank you, girls!!!

I must make a point that this website and all the actual onomastic studies in Glasgow are blessed by Professor Carole Hough. To get to know her personally has been a huge honour for me. I met her on the ICOS conference in Barcelona in 2011, but before we prepared a research proposal on the diachronic socio-cultural study of Glaswegian personal names in 2010 in order to apply for UK postdoc and EU grant. I am very thankful to her! My next posting will be dedicated to Prof. Hough.

Prof. Jürgen Udolph. Video 3

about family names, their origin and meaning

International Conference on Onomastics “Name and Naming”

The International Conference on Onomastics “Name and Naming”

Onomastics in Contemporary Public Space
Baia Mare, 9-11 May 2013

Please visit the website of ICONN 2

Sections

Names in public space
Anthroponomastics
Toponomastics

Official conference languages: Romanian, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish

Timing

Every paper presentation is allotted 25 minutes (20 minutes for presentation + 5 minutes for discussions).
The early registration fee is lei 230 (EUR 50), to be paid by March 10, and the late registration fee is lei 320 (EUR 70) to be paid upon arrival.

IMPORTANT DATES

10.09.2012 – 10.01.2013: submission of registration form (see the "Registration" section of the ICONN 2 website)
10 January 2013: notification of acceptance
10 February 2013: first circular letter and programme draft
10 March 2013: closing date for early registration (lei 230/EUR50) 10 April 2013: second circular letter and final programme
10 June 2013: Full paper submission.

Great!!! I'd like to visit this conference. I have never been to Romania before... 

Baia Mare!!! It might be cool!

Baia Mare ([ˈbaja ˈmare], Hungarian: Nagybánya; German: Frauenbach; Ukrainian: Бая-Маре; Latin: Rivulus Dominarum; Yiddish: באניע, Banya) is a municipality in northwestern Romania and the capital of Maramureş County. The city is situated about 600 kilometres from Bucharest, the capital of Romania, 70 kilometres from the border with Hungary and 50 kilometres from the border with Ukraine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baia_Mare
http://baiamarecity.ro/

and for University: http://www.ubm.ro/

The conference will take place here:

Join us! Let's naming out!!!

ICOS - "heart of the world onomastics"

ICOS is "International Council of Onomastic Sciences"

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: here

The International Council of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS) is an international academic organization of scholars with a special interest in onomastics, the scientific study of names (e.g. place-names, personal names, and proper names of all other kinds). The official languages of ICOS are English, French, and German.

Members research the origin and history of names, the personal name-systems used by different cultures, the demographic patterns of names in different societies, the use and significance of names of characters in literature, brand-name creation, and many related topics in the naming of persons, places, institutions, works of art, and other miscellaneous objects. They are also involved in practical projects such as the international standardization of geographical names. The aim of ICOS (as opposed to the many national societies for name-study) is the advancement, representation and co-ordination of name-research on an international level and in an interdisciplinary context. To that end, it is engaged in the publication of research and the development of research tools as described below. The Council's members are drawn from disciplines such as linguistics and philology, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, geography and literary research. This organization has replaced the former International Committee of Onomastic Sciences, which was a closed society consisting exclusively of co-opted representatives of countries. The former body was therefore not open to individual scholars as the present one is.

ICOS publishes the annual journal ONOMA, which is its official publication. ONOMA is managed by a General Editor in conjunction with an Editorial Board. It contains topical research reports as well as basic theoretical articles concerning all areas of scholarly name research. Presently, each issue is thematic, and has a guest editor. ICOS also publishes an irregular newsletter.
The ISSN of ONOMA is 0078-463-X.

ICOS has two active working groups, striving:

- to create an international bibliography of name-study

- to help create an internationally-agreed technical terminology for name-study

The International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, which is normally held every three years, is a major academic conference organized on behalf of ICOS by one of its members. The General Assembly of ICOS, which also functions as its business meeting, and at which its officers are elected, is usually held at these congresses. The ordinary business of ICOS is transacted by the elected Board of Directors.

Congresses

Paris, 1938
Paris, 1947
Bruxelles [Brussels], 1949
Uppsala, 1952
Salamanca, 1955
München [Munich], 1958
Firenze [Florence], 1961
Amsterdam, 1963
London, 1966
Wien [Vienna], 1969
Sofia, 1972
Bern, 1975
Kraków, 1978
Ann Arbor, 1981
Leipzig, 1984
Québec, 1987
Helsinki, 1990
Trier, 1993
Aberdeen, 1996
Santiago de Compostela, 1999
Uppsala, 2002
Pisa, 2005
York University, Toronto, 2008
Barcelona 2011
Glasgow 2014

The Proceedings of each Conference to no. 20, as well as those of no. 23, have been published. Three volumes of no. 21 have also been published, and the first of no. 22, and the rest are in preparation.

Prof. Jürgen Udolph. Video 1

"Introduction to onomastics" in German from the famous German onomatologist Prof. Jürgen Udolph (University of Leipzig). It's very clear and understandble for everybody!

Digital Onomastics, and Frenetic place-names

Today I allow myself to cite the posting of Dereck Mueller on digital onomastics and frenetic place-names:

"What happens to onomastics or proper place-names with infusions of the digital? How do the logics of the web, networked writing and folksonymy let loose (a plentitude of named small-pieces, loosely joined) the propriety of an onomastics founded on scarcity, where place-names refer formally to physical locations and also depend upon authorization, a kind of official license? We will have one name and one name only! Erm, okay, two...two names. No more. Granted, place-names or toponyms are not altogether unraveled or let loose. Kansas is still "Kansas," or "KS," even in Google Maps (at a certain scale, though, the name vanishes because it's too specific, too local; KS fades into anyplace). But while these stabilized place-names remain on highway signs and also showing at certain scales of the cybercartographic mash-ups, the digital introduces a capacity for differently circulating and contending name systems. Toponyms are further compounded. For now I don't care whether we're online or on I-90. New (by which I mean not pre-fixed), folksonomic names and tags don't automatically replace the official names, although they might one day contend with them and even displace them or unsettle them a bit.

Maybe the questions are all wrong. What is the tie between tagging and place-names, whether space is prefixed with geo- or cyber-? No, no, that's not quite it either. Or else it is, and I'm not able to come up with a satisfying answer. But the digital seems to awaken something between protocols (IP addresses and URLs) as place-names and cartographic toponyms (physical place-names on maps) as tags. In other words, online mapping apps make me think that something shifts (or is brought nearer together, maybe) between official geographic place-names and Weinberger's idea of the web as "places without space." The web's geography of place-names mixes the proper, the common with the improper and uncommon, with the uncanny and anachronistic (even if the a href requires syntactic precision).

Here you could have just read Weinberger's "Space" chapter. Credit to Jeff's stuff for getting me to think about this, too."

 Posted by Derek Mueller at June 16, 2006 here http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/archives/001223.html

In this posting the term of digital onomastics is understood literally. It has nothing to do with the new sub-science, but, however, it concerns the e-Onomastics. It's not about virtual place-names or fictitious toponyms from the literature, art and cinema worlds, but internet and/or computer reflects of real place-names. This topic is also very interesting!   

onomastics.org

The first site I can advise you is that of Dr. Peder Gammeltoft (Copenhagen University): www.onomastics.org

Let me quote a fascinating rationale of the e-Onomastics:

"Digital Onomastics

The idea of digital onomastics is to ‘lift’ place-names and personal names out of the substantial collections in scientific institutions and the books produced such places and give them a new life on the internet for the benefit of researchers and everyman alike. 

Why bother with making place-names online and searchable on fancy maps? And is it better to read about the origins of one’s first name on the computer screen? Well, not necessarily – but there is a great interest in searching place-names and personal names on the internet. Unfortunately, much of the material is of a low scientific and informative standard.

Unfortunately, most onomasts have no computer programming skills and it has thus been difficult to disseminate most of the metriculously collected name data in archives and collections to the internet in a digital form.

This website hopes to bring inspiration to fellow onomasts to start going digital and to experiment with digital formats. It really is not that difficult..."

The author sets some examples where the e-Toponomastics (e-Toponymy, digital place-names studies) prevails. My research focuses mostly on the e-Antroponomastics (e-Antroponymy, digital personal names studies).

Digital onomastics

If you google for "digital onomastics", you'll get 21 result, from which 6 links lead us to the posting of Dereck Mueller "Digital Onomastics, Frenetic Place-Names" (http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/archives/001223.html) and 15 occurrences drive to the above-mentioned (within this blog it's better to say "below") Peder Gammeltoft's site www.onomastics.org.

That's all!!! I may state proudly that we stay in the beginning of this new meta-research sub-field.

What's "e-Onomastics"? (part 2)

On the one hand, under e-Onomastics, we could only mean a computationally intensive name-based science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or onomastic science that uses immense data sets of proper names that require computer assistance.

But, from my part, I'd prefer to use the term "e-Onomastics" in a wide and simplified sense.

As I admit that e-Onomastics is a synonym of Digital Onomastics, I suggest to define it as does Dr. Peder Gammeltoft, Danish onomastician at Department of Scandinavian Research at Copenhagen University, on his site www.onomastics.org: Digital Onomastics is a "Name Research making use of digital resources for the collection, interpretation and dissemination of onomastic matter".

(from here: http://nfi.ku.dk/ansatte/beskrivelse/?id=185759)

In regard thereto, the "e" in the "e-Onomastics" could stand not only for

• "enhanced" and 
• "enabled" (as in e-Science) but for 
• "electronic" also (as in e-Mail); and humoristically for
• "eugen(e)" - onomastics from Eugene, because it's my forename, in English Eugene, in French Eugène, in German Eugen, in Russian Евгений, in Spanish Eugenio and so on...

In the meantime, following the modern trend of all possible iPad, iPhone, iMac, iWork, iTunes, iCloud and iOS, I suggest using the term iOnomastics, although it's very obscure what "i" means therein. As well as Steve Jobs for the products of Apple Inc. does, we may decrypt that differently as "individual", "intellectual", "I", "internet", "inter-", "instruct", "inform", "inspire", etc. All of them claim to be perfect.

When (if!) someday I will be rich and famous Professor of Applied Onomastics (a-Onomastics?), I will produce some onomastic application for Apple Inc., and in that case I could title it "MacOnoma(stics)" or "ApplOnom" (applied onomastics). Perhaps I could develop a name system for McDonald's products, then it would be McOnoma(stics), or I could crown the name-giving department in IKEA ))))))) (ONOMIKEA, NAMIKEA, ...).

Thereby I urge that all new terms invented by me in this post must be considered as a claim staking procedure. All rights reserved!!!

What's e-Onomastics? (part 1)

Now it's time to explain what I mean by the term "e-Onomastics".

It seems to be that nobody used it before me.

If you type in "e-Onomastics" into Google, you will get solely 36 occurrences, from which 32 represent the combination "e onomastics" where "e" is the rest of the precedent word (thE, point (E), or herE, etc.), then 3 porposition to register your site under e-onomastics.co.uk and 1 occurrence indicates that somebody owns a domain named "eonomastics.info". I must confess that the latter already belongs to your obediant servant. I have a strong intention to use it for the further researches.

If you search for "eonomastics", you get 17 results. Among them we find 12 occurrences for my domain eonomastics.info, one link to my page on LinkedIn where I noticed it by way of example of my research interest, one rest of "dEONOMASTICS" (field of linguistics exploring the derivatives from proper names), and 3 occurrences for rests from "digestiblE ONOMASTICS.

That's all!!!

Formally speaking, I have been inspired by the word-formation "e-Humanities", synonym for Digital Himanities. It's interesting to point out that in the English version of Wiki article on "digital humanities, e-Humanities as a term is not mentioned at all. But, we can find it in the German version:

Die Begriffe "Digital Humanities", "e-Humanities" und "Humanities Computing" werden synonym verwendet, wobei die beiden ersteren heute gebräuchlicher sind. E-Humanities ist analog zu e-Science gebildet und steht für "enhanced" oder auch "enabled" Humanities. (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Humanities)

based on Andreas Aschenbrenner, Tobias Blanke, Stuart Dunn, Martina Kerzel, Andrea Rapp, Andrea Zielinski: Von e-Science zu e-Humanities - Digital vernetzte Wissenschaft als neuer Arbeits- und Kreativbereich für Kunst und Kultur. In: Bibliothek. Forschung und Praxis. Bd. 31, Nr. 1, 2007, S. 11–21

In this case, what do they understand by e-Science?

"E-Science (or eScience) is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable distributed collaboration. The term was created by John Taylor, the Director General of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology in 1999 and was used to describe a large funding initiative starting in November 2000. E-Sciences include particle physics, bio-informatics, earth sciences and social simulations." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Science)

In the German version of English article on e-Science is stated as follows:


"Das Konzept der eScience setzt sich in den einzelnen Teilbereichen fort. Dort kommt es dann zu Begriffsbildungen wie e-Geography, e-Humanities, e-Medicine oder e-Engineering.
Was vor allem in Deutschland und Großbritannien unter dem Begriff e-Science diskutiert wird, entspricht in den USA etwa dem Konzept der "cyberinfrastructure" und in Australien dem Konzept der "e-Research"." (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Science)


But what's "e-Humanities"?

Quotation from www.e-humanities.net (University of Leipzig's project):

"Various efforts in digitization helped making available a wealth of resources on a global scale. But mostly, the sheer amount of data collected is extremely hard to handle. For the researchers it is naturally difficult to stay focused on a complex research question while manually working with the data employing conventional query mechanisms. The value of the data is clearly restricted by the existing means of browsing and processing it.

What lies ahead is a future of vastly growing collections of digital artifacts available to researchers in the Humanities. The gathered resources will aim to cover more niches and get more complete in the popular areas. They therefore yield answers to questions that currently cannot even be foreseen.

The e-Humanities aim to bridge the gap between specialist scientists, digital resources and data analysis methods from the computer science. They employ techniques such as Data and Information Visualization in the context of scientific inquiry to craft immerse systems for an Explorative Search within the data bases. They extend Text Mining and Information Retrieval to work on historical texts, uncovering hidden links through a re-use analysis. They build tools for working with ontologies and metadata repositories, specifically with the Humanities in mind.

In that manner they lead from a quantitative view on the data to a qualitative assessment of the underlying facts. While automatic data analysis can never replace or surpass qualified human expertise, it is the perfect augmentation for researchers' digital workflows and an invaluable means of navigation through huge resource collections. The e-Humanities are not going to change the subject of research in the Humanities and are in many cases not even touching the general methodology. What they can achieve, nevertheless, is a whole new level of effectiveness and statistical reliability as well as a whole new way to approach digitized resources."

(to be continued...)

What's ONOMASTICS?

Onomastics or onomatology is the study of proper names of all kinds and the origins of names. The words are from the Greek: onomastikos, "of or belonging to naming" and onomatologia, from ónoma "name".

(based on Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon.)

Just for fun from here: http://reagenallen.wordpress.com/ 

Let's get started

Dear Visitors, dear Friends, dear Colleagues,

I am happy to inform you that I decided to start my blog on "digital onomastics", or just shortly "e-Onomastics", that corresponds to my area of research and my interests.