In the Winter of each year, the members of the NAMES Editorial Board review and select the best article of the year.  Articles are judged across three criteria: 1.) creativity and originality; 2.) potential scholarly contribution to onomastics; and 3.) writing style and organization. For 2025, the international team of onomastic experts on the NAMES Board selected “Mapping Place Names” for the prestigious award.  The winning publication was co-authored by Søren Wichmann and Lennart Chevallier of the University of Kiel in Germany. After being informed of their selections, the authors kindly agreed to give an e-interview about their research to NAMES Editor-in-Chief, I.M. Nick.

Your work utilizes GeoNames data. Can you please describe the database for researchers who are interested in learning more about it?

GeoNames is a great public domain agglomerative data base of place names and is being continuously updated. There are more than 13 million entries for place names pertaining to more than 250 countries and 9 feature classes, including populated places, water bodies, roads, mountains, etc. It gives geographical coordinates for each place. The information comes in simple text files that are easy to download.

Much of your research relies upon the use of computer analysis to identify patterns in toponymic data. In many ways, this methodological approach exemplifies a major trend in contemporary onomastic research. Can you explain briefly what you feel are some of the advantages and disadvantages of this methodological approach?

With the help of computational tools, such as our package, it’s possible to identify generic elements of toponyms and visualize them through distributional maps. We think a major advantage is that scholars and laypeople alike immediately gain a very general idea of what is happening in an area. Distributions of toponyms can help us, for instance, to understand settlement histories or the relationship between people and the landscape.

A disadvantage, or rather a limitation to be aware of, is that in order to get a really thorough grasp of individual place names it is often necessary to verify their meanings and structures through linguistic analysis and attention to early attestations of names. Our package does not provide such analyses: it can only help in the search for relevant shapes of names.

Researchers interested in learning more about this cutting-edge approach to toponymic research are encouraged to read the authors’ methodological note which appears in NAMES 72, no. 3: 76-83.