The World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito, while being formidable research tools in development, are nonetheless, at the moment, relatively limited depending on the analysis that is being conducted. In my experience with the World Historical Gazetteer, I was unfortunately unable to upload the data provided by the World Historical Gazetteer. However, upon typing names into the World Historical Gazetteer search, I was struck to find names listed in different languages, even indigenous languages such as Seneca. However, the gazetteer seems to primarily operate by proper place names, as the term “Seneca Nation” furnished no results, while “Tonawanda”, a reservation properly called the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, did reflect a result on the gazetteer. However, it seems as though the World Historical Gazetteer, in the case of North America, is primarily concerned with place names that either existed in the recent past or continue to be in use. The place names indicated by the gazetteer are also sporadic; both Elba, NY and East Elba (a very small unincorporated community within the Town of Elba in Genesee County) are shown by the Gazetteer. However, ARTPARK, a state park in Lewiston, NY that once held a Seneca village and French trading post, is nonetheless not present.
While working with Recogito, I had a comparable experience. While Recogito could recognize place names from the distant past, such as fortifications and British and French colonies, it could not establish boundaries for historical entities such as New France or the colony of New York. This is understandable, as the nature of colonial boundaries is itself obscure. While European states like France and Britain would claim vast swaths of territory, they were unable to govern and occupy most of it. Furthermore, such colonial land claims would not reflect the indigenous peoples who lived within them and exercised sovereignty over their ancestral lands despite European claims. Mapping such dynamics would prove to be very difficult even for experienced colonial historians. Furthermore, Recogito is limited by spelling and language. It would be impossible to upload original French place names or French transliterations of indigenous place names, as spelling during the 18th century was sporadic, and many such place names are only present in historical documents and are difficult to connect to present localities. This, however, is only symptomatic of a developing gazetteer. As Ryan Shaw demonstrates in Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers, gazetteers will ideally indicate the presence of other place names, such as early modern Spanish place names, in a given locality (Shaw 54), thereby serving as an important research tool for historians. This however, leaves a major question for me: as the name of a location in New France or the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy could have several different place names depending on the which indigenous group was speaking, and the indigenous names would be transliterated into French letters in multiple ways, could a comprehensive gazetteer of places in North America be created, and would it be truly all-encompassing, or will there always be limitations on the information both available to and from the gazetteer?