Place Names

Behind every artifact in a museum is a record that catalogs—if known—its title, historical period, creator, and point of origin, among other kinds of metadata. But what to call things can be tricky: i cula ni bokola or cannibal fork? Voodoo or vodou?

The Getty Vocabularies are a set of free, open-source controlled vocabularies that provide a common terminology to describe cultural works, artist names, and geographic locations, among other things. Libraries, museums, and archives use controlled vocabularies to make sure that information is categorized in a consistent way. In a library cataloging system, for instance, a controlled vocabulary might dictate that “automobile” always be used, instead of synonyms like “car” or “vehicle,” to describe a book’s subject. This standardization guarantees that all relevant information is easily retrievable when someone searches for anything related to automobiles.

But language is not neutral; it reflects prejudices, social norms, and power dynamics. Because words shape how we understand the world, it becomes necessary over time to scrutinize these terms. To help repair outdated terminology in the Getty Vocabularies, graduate intern Emily Benoff added to or modified over 200 entries referring to Native American reservations and important Indigenous sites in the Getty’s Thesaurus of Geographic Names, which has over 3 million records and users from 172 countries. The previous place names had been scraped from a dataset created by the U.S. Geological Survey, a government agency. To do this work, Benoff consulted sources authored by tribal communities, using their preferred terms over the names imposed by white settlers.

Benoff has a master’s degree in archival studies from UCLA, specializing in community-based archiving. “I was thinking a lot about the representation of marginalized communities and how to question what counts as authoritative knowledge,” she says. “Who should be telling these stories, and using what language?” While processing collections at a community archive in the Skid Row History Museum & Archive in downtown Los Angeles as part of her graduate work, she realized that a lot of what’s considered “authoritative terminology” did not accurately represent the experiences of the people she was trying to document.

Creating more inclusive Getty Vocabularies presented its challenges. Benoff wanted to repair historically inaccurate and biased terminology without whitewashing the histories of oppression. How to condense the complexities of the past into a series of text fields? “There’s no way to indicate how different people see places differently and the history behind how that came to be,” she says. “You can have two different names, and it’s the exact same place, but all you get to choose is through a drop-down menu.”

To address this issue, Benoff reviewed sources like tribal constitutions to add more information about the history of the reservations, experimenting with using open text fields to accurately represent ambiguous and contested histories. But even the word “reservation,” as land set aside following the violent displacement of many tribes from their homelands, has a troubled history. “A lot of Indigenous people will say ‘reservations’ is a government term. It’s not the ancestral territory,” she says. “So even that difference can impact how somebody interprets history. It’s hard to get all that into data when all you see is a word.” In a record for the Nez Perce reservation, for example, she added sacred and historic sites like Coyote’s Fishnet and Heart of the Monster to convey traditional Indigenous ways of relating to the land.

On its surface, data might not seem that exciting, “data entry” often being a synonym for drudgery. But for anyone who has ever done an online search or looked up a book in a library catalog, that search was powered by a vast network of datasets, an unseen scaffolding maintained by the invisible labor of workers like Benoff. The world runs on data, making it ever important to consider where it comes from and that it reflects the world we want to live in.

Learn more about Getty Vocabularies