From the 18th to the 20th of September 2017, at the University of Namibia, an International Symposium on Place Names in Windhoek, Namibia will be held.  The theme of the conference is Critical Toponymy: Place Names in Political and Commercial Landscapes.  Details about the conference, registration, and abstract submission process can be found here.

The conference is organized by the Joint IGU/ICA Commission on Toponymy, the Unit for Language Facilitation and Empowerment at the University of the Free State (UFS), and the Department of Language and Literature Studies at the University of Namibia (UNAM)

Keynote speakers:

• Peter E. Raper (RSA): Member of the Steering Board, Joint IGU/ICA Commission on Toponymy; Research Fellow and Professor Extraordinaire in Linguistics, Unit for Language Facilitation and Empowerment, UFS
• Mathhias Brenzinger (RSA): Mellon Research Chair (African Language Diversity in the Linguistic section of the School of African & Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town), Director of CALDi (Centre for African Language Diversity), Curator of TALA (The African Language Archive).

On the 12th of May 2017, the Welsh Map Symposium 2017 or “Carto Cymru” will be take place at the National Library of Wales.  The theme of this year’s event is “Measuring Meadows: The development of estate mapping and it value in portraying the historical landscape”.  All interested map lovers, names enthusiasts, and Welsh fans are encouraged to purchase their tickets soon.  Although the Symposium is still a few months away, spaces are filling up FAST.  Information on tickets and the scheduled programme can be found here.

This event is hosted by the National Library of Wales in partnership with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates, Bangor University. Talks on the day will include a talk on the history of estate mapping by Peter Barber, Ex-Head of Maps, British Library and “Cantrefi a Cymydau: Rediscovering the Medieval Boundaries of Wales for the Digital Age” by John Dollery & Scott Lloyd, Royal Commission.

The fifth biennial conference on electronic lexicography, eLex 2017, will take place in Holiday Inn Leiden, Netherlands, from 19-21 September 2017.

The conference aims to investigate state-of-the-art technologies and methods for automating the creation of dictionaries. Over the past two decades, advances in NLP techniques have enabled the automatic extraction of different kinds of lexicographic information from corpora and other (digital) resources. As a result, key lexicographic tasks, such as finding collocations, definitions, example sentences, translations, are more and more beginning to be transferred from humans to machines. Automating the creation of dictionaries is highly relevant, especially for under-resourced languages, where dictionaries need to be compiled from scratch and where the users cannot wait for years, often decades, for the dictionary to be “completed”. Key questions to be discussed are: What are the best practices for automatic data extraction, crowdsourcing and data visualisation? How far can we get with Lexicography from scratch and what is the role of the lexicographer in this process?

The meeting will be hosted by the Institute for Dutch Language (Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal).

Starting with this year, the conference proceedings are going to be published by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o., based on Botanická 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic.

From the 15th to the 19th of May 2017, the Clans and Surnames of Ireland Genealogy Programme will take place at the Great National Abbeycourt Hotel in Nenagh, County Tipperary. The scheduled programme will include expert genealogy workshops, seminars, lectures, field trips and valuable research advice for Irish family researchers.

Field trips will be offered in County Clare, Limerick, and Galway to facilitate a range of requirements. The programme offers walking tours, graveyard tours, and landscape character assessment fieldwork. Conservation, preservation & collections care workshops are also scheduled within the programme for the week.

Speakers include  Kenneth Nicholls, Dr Paul MacCotter, Patrick Guinness, Sean J. Murphy, Fiona Fitzsimons, Dr Joe Mannion, Donough McGillacuddy,  David Ryan, Regina Sexton, Lorna Moloney, Dr Michael C. Keane, Dr Ursula Callaghan, Rosaleen Underwood, Brian Donovan, John Tierney, Aiden Feerick, John Nangle,  Margaret Jordan, Jennifer Armstrong Zinck, Jane Halloran-Ryan, Jennifer Wood, Tony Harpur. Tony Browne, Penny Walters, and Treasa Kerrigan.

More details about the programme, including registration, can be found here.

The 21st Biennial Meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA-21) will be held from the 9th to the 11th of June 2017 in Rockley, Barbados. The Conference will be held at the Accra Beach Hotel and Spa, located on Barbados’ south coast. The Dictionary Society of North America has held biennial meetings since 1995. Bringing together scholars of lexicography and professional lexicographers, the conference is an important event for anyone interested in modern dictionary research and practices. The upcoming conference in Barbados will be the first time that the conference meets outside the US and Canada. It is hoped that the Caribbean setting will inspire different avenues of inquiry and new interest in the diverse language varieties of the region, as well as just being a very pleasant place to be.  For more details, head over to the DSNA website.

From the 24 to the 27th of March 2017, the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland (SNSBI) will be holding its Spring Conference in Oxfordshire, England. The programme will include several scientific presentations on toponyms in and around Oxfordshire.

The Spring Conference will be held from March 24 to 27 at the Milton Hill House Hotel, Steventon, Oxfordshire. Milton Hill House Hotel is a ten-minute taxi ride from Didcot Parkway Station. It is a 15 minute walk from bus stops in Milton Park, Rowstock, or Steventon. The location of the conference commemorates the earlier county survey volumes of Margaret Gelling: Milton Hill was historically in Berkshire and is now in Oxfordshire. 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, we also have a number of papers on personal names of the area: locative surnames of Oxfordshire, South Midlands surnames, names of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds.

More on this special event can be found here.