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Transforming historical street names into FAIR research data

by Orysia Vira, Ukrainian Catholic University

Street names are more than simple labels on a map ‒ they are historical documents that record the life of a city. When a street name changes abruptly or when two names coexist for the same place, these shifts reveal stories about the people who lived there and transformations that cities underwent over centuries. In medieval and early modern Lviv, a multiethnic trading hub in what is now western Ukraine, street names were recorded in Latin, German, and later Polish, reflecting the linguistic landscape of a city where Armenian merchants, Jewish craftsmen, Polish burghers, and Ruthenian communities and smaller groups representing other nations and ethnic communities (Greeks, Italians, Scots, and Welsh etc.) negotiated shared urban space.

For nearly a decade, I collected street names from Lviv’s medieval and early modern tax registers and council records, creating a database of street names covered 1382-1768 years. The data was there, carefully transcribed and analysed as part of my PhD research on the historical urbanonymy of Lviv. But how could I make this research not just accessible, but truly reusable? How could I transform years of archival work into a resource that other scholars could discover and access?

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