From the 30th to the 31st of March, 2017, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will be holding the 2017 Great Plains Symposium. The theme of this year’s event is “Flat Places: Deep Identities”. As the name implies, many of the presentations planned for this event explore the nexus between toponymy and cartography. An excellent example is Chris Steinke’s scheduled paper “Melvin Gilmore, James Owen Dorsey, and the Collection of Indigenous Place Names”. A complete listing of the conference schedule as well as information about registration can be found here.

Why are maps so fascinating? What do they tell us, what assumptions were necessary to construct them, how do they shape our knowledge? The symposium calls for a critical reexamination of maps and the mapping of our region.

This topic is also to be understood figuratively, inviting us to consider the myriad ways in which “maps,” “mapping,” and “place” shape all aspects of how we see and understand the Great Plains. Thus included in the topic are questions of how place and mapping are used in or influence identity and culture, economy and society, agricultural practices, natural resources, environmental issues, business strategy, art and creative expression, literature of place, social relationships, politics and social movements, “deep mapping,” and any other ways in which concepts of mapping and place are revealing and useful.

In September of 2002, the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) formed a special “Working Group” (WG) dedicated to the treatment, use, and reduction of exonyms in the context of geographical names standardization. From the 6th to the 8th of April 2017, the UNGEGN-WG will be holding its 19th Meeting in Prague, Czechia. Organized by the Czech Geodetical Office, this meeting will focus on “Romanization Systems”. Detailed information about this meeting can be found here. The meeting will be held in conjunction with a meeting of the UNGEGN Working
Group on Romanization Systems (Convenor: Peeter Päll) and composed of two days
(Thursday, Friday) of paper presentations and discussions and one day (Saturday) with a bus excursion. Thursday (morning and afternoon) and Friday morning will be
devoted to the meeting of our WG on Exonyms, Friday afternoon to the meeting of the WG on Romanization Systems.

From the 12th to the 16th of March, 2017, the German city of Leipzig will be the host of the 10th international conference dedicated to exploring fundamental issues in the science of translation, or X. Internationaler Kongress zu Grundfragen der Translatologie – 10th Leipzig International Conference on Translation & Interpretation Studies.  During this conference, a special workshop will be held on the translation of names. This workshop is a part of the work being conducted by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names or UNGEGN.  Details on the conference, including sessions and registration, can be found at their website.

While recent LICTRA congresses have focussed on T&I didactics (1997), T&I competence (2004), T&I quality (2007) and international synergies in T&I research (2010), the tenth in the series will concentrate on where T&I studies stand in the light of digitalisation in the age of industry 4.0 or Internet 4.0, as the increasing use of internet technology to facilitate communication between humans, machines and products is often called. The technological building blocks of this world are cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, which describes a process whereby the computer as a stand-alone device will lose much of its importance, as a network of identifiably different “intelligent” physical objects – things – is built up in a structure that is similar to or is a development of the Internet.

The Nordic Cooperative Committee for Onomastic Research or NORNA will be holding its 47th official symposium from the 11th to the 12th of May 2017 in Lund, Sweden. The theme of this symposium will be “Bebyggelsenamnens dynamik”.  More information on this special event can be found at the website.

The symposium is jointly organized by the Institute for Language and Folklore and the Network for settlement names research, kept at the Archive Centre South in Lund. It is here that the collections of dialect and place names in the Lund archive are now located, and are available to the public. During the symposium there will be the opportunity to visit these collections.

The symposium will include a workshop on the names of -lev and -löv, open to
all contributions. The workshop is based on the various archaeological and
linguistic research in recent years, which has shed new light on this name type, both
terms of etymology, dissemination, and cultural context.

The Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland will be holding its Spring Conference from the 24th to the 27th of March in Milton, UK (near Didoct).  The conference location was selected in commemoration of the county survey volumes of Margaret Gelling. As space is filling up quickly, organizers encourage interested attendees to register soon.  For more details and registration, go to their website.

Many of the conference papers will relate to Oxfordshire and the surrounding counties but papers on all regions of Britain and Ireland will be presented. The speaker on Friday evening will be Ros Faith, on farming in woodland and in downland. Papers on place-names of Oxfordshire and the surrounding region will cover topics including: Anglo-Saxon estates, animals and place-names, field-names and archaeology. To celebrate the publication of The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, there will also be a number of papers on personal names of the area: locative surnames of Oxfordshire, South Midlands surnames, and names of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds.