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8.   Spelling of Place Names


As well as their outlines, the place names present on maps and the spelling of these names can provide an indication of the relationships between the maps. The spelling of each of the places identified on a particular map was therefore recorded. Once this data had been collected for all available maps, a number of places  were selected for analysis from each island. These were selected on the basis that they were named on a wide selection of the maps but showed characteristic variations between maps in the spelling of their names.


For each selected place, the maps were grouped into sets within which the spelling of that place was the same and the list of maps within each set was recorded. Finally the number of times any two maps belonged to the same set was determined across all the selected places and for all islands.


In practice, because the maps varied greatly in scale,  the total number of names on individual maps also varied greatly. This meant that the maximum possible number of matching place names between any pair of maps was limited to the number of the selected names on the map with fewest such names. Thus small maps, with fewer names, would in general be expected to show fewer matching spellings than larger maps. This difficulty was addressed by expressing the number of matching names as a percentage of the total number of the selected places common to both maps.  The resulting percentages were taken as measures of the closeness of the relationship of the pair of maps.


However,  even with maps derived from the same source, a complete match of the spelling of place names can not necessarily be expected. In the case of maps by Collins and Mackenzie where more than one map of the same area was published within the same volume, there are several instances of the name of a particular place being spelt differently on the different maps.

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