OpenStreetMap
I am Austrian and have been working with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) in Vienna until I retired to Ireland in 2020.
I always liked maps and I got interested in OpenStreetMap at some point, recognizing the great potential of it. I also got interested in Irish placenames after moving to a Gaeltacht area on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. During the Covid lockdowns I started some mapping of Irish placenames, but at some point I gave up, as I did not really see an audience for it and found it rather time consuming.
Recently I learned that some people in our the community want to record the Irish names of farmers fields, which until now have been passed on by word only from one generation to the other. But this does not work anymore, and there is fear in the older generation that the names will be lost forever.
When I heard this I suggested to map the fields and their names and did some testing with OpenStreetMap, which worked very well and was much appreciated by members of the community and of CFLT ([Comharchumann Forbartha an Leith Triúigh] (https://www.cflt.ie/)).
I am not only mapping disconnected field areas, but instead I first add field boundaries as barriers with proper tagging (wall, hedge,…) and then build a relation documenting the land use and adding the field name to it. This way it is not only about displaying field names on the map but also adds useful details for navigation and avoiding unnatural and bad looking gaps between landuse areas.
To be able to extract all this data for producing specialized maps for the community using QGIS and also as backup, the features are tagged with a new tag key cflt:category
Discussion
Comment from ChristianA on 20 February 2023 at 07:16
When I map an area in Sweden, I usually look at an old national map to add older placenames. I think that even though there is not a large “audience” for this, it is nice to add them as it will make the map more complete and it will help “remembering” these places. I mainly do this on places that used to be old farms/isolated dwellings that are nowadays only a pile of stones, old fields etc.
I know OSM is not a historical map, but as long as the names are used by locals or there is something left “on the ground” from an old house or similar, I think it may be added to the map.
Comment from SK53 on 20 February 2023 at 14:02
Field names are actually an invaluable resource for linguistic scholars of language. Because of their very nature of being passed down the generations they often preserve older pronunciations and dialect words.
My cousin, formerly a lecturer in Irish at the University of Ulster, is an expert in this area, and is currently working on a linguistic atlas of Brittany. He always places great value on the actual pronunciation, so it is worth making audio recordings relating to this data as well.
I think another germanophone, b-unicycling, has also mapped field names around Killarney.