'Created one hundred years ago, the Board has functioned to provide standardized spellings of geographic names to meet official U.S. requirements. It is the oldest body of its kind in the world. Without an independent budget, its programs reflected overall budgetary restrictions that affected its support agencies. Immediately prior to the Second World War, for example, the Board worked at a relatively slow pace. With the onset of that conflict, however, the Board's staff was greatly enlarged to provide names for new maps and charts needed by the U.S. armed services. In 1947 the Board was reorganized by Public Law 242 of the 80th Congress and given explicit missions to meet new requirements the nation had for geographic names on a global basis. Since that time, and in the present era of new nations and changed names, the Board has functioned as the world's foremost body of experts dealing with geographic names' -- page 1.

Well before the innovation of maps, gazetteers served as the main geographic referencing system for hundreds of years. Consisting of a specialized index of place names, gazetteers traditionally linked descriptive elements with topographic features and coordinates. Placing Names is inspired by that tradition of discursive place-making and by contemporary approaches to digital data management that have revived the gazetteer and guided its development in recent decades. Adopted by researchers in the Digital Humanities and Spatial Sciences, gazetteers provide a way to model the kind of complex cultural, vernacular, and perspectival ideas of place that can be located in texts and expanded into an interconnected framework of naming history. This volume brings together leading and emergent scholars to examine the history of the gazetteer, its important role in geographic information science, and its use to further the reach and impact of spatial reasoning into the digital age.