Tag: project

The Rites of December

At the beginning of every year, I write a big list of the things I want to do that year. I’ve done this for the last few years now, and it’s a great way of keeping those things at the front of your mind throughout the year – I look back at it all the time.

Note that it is not a to-do list. These are not things that I have to do by the end of the year, and they don’t necessarily roll over into the next year if I don’t do them. It is simply a list of things I want to do – an intention list. (It’s a concept I want to explain more in another post or video.)

Inevitably, there are some things on the list each year that I don’t get round to – I’m just focusing on other things, and they get pushed to the back of the queue. What I want to do this year – and in subsequent years – is to make December the month of doing things that I haven’t gotten round to all year. All those things on the list for the year that I haven’t done yet I want to do in December.

Of course, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to do all of them. Some of them are quite big projects – far too much to do in one twelfth of the year – but that’s fine. To complement my New Year’s Day Tradition, and to give the year a sense of completion, for me, December is about finishing things off.

New Project: A Dictionary of British Place Names

I have started a new project today. In short, it is a small web-app giving information on the etymology of British place names. I’ve made it a sub-site of my main website – you can view it here: http://benjamintmilnes.com/dictionary-of-british-place-names/#/.

I decided to do this project quite spontaneously this morning. The idea’s been floating around in my head for a few days or so. I’m normally quite reluctant to start new projects of this kind nowadays – I have a lot of projects – too many, really – and each new project takes time away from the others. However, this project is quite valuable for the world-building for On The Subject Of Trolls, and it is relatively simple to do, so I decided to start it.

Amazingly, I’ve managed to get it to a ‘finished’ state in just a few hours. Now, when I say ‘finished’ here, I don’t necessarily mean absolutely complete in all ways. I find it useful to distinguish between different kinds of ‘finished’. A part of this project is actually researching and writing out the etymology for all or lots of British place names. (I may not do absolutely all British place names – I may only do a few hundred or a few thousand in total.) This is something that is very difficult to do all in one go – this is something that’s better to do gradually over time, so I don’t include this in what I mean by ‘finished’. Similarly, with any web-app, there are often hundreds of features that you could program into it – I don’t include these in ‘finished’ either. With projects like this, I generally consider them finished when I have something that I can put online, that works (even if it only has a limited number of features), that looks polished, and that contains well-formed data (even if it’s only a small amount of data). In the case of this project, I have managed to create 11 data files for place names, create the compiler (which takes those data files and outputs a JSON file that the web-app effectively uses as its database), and create a polished front-end.

So the web-app is now online and available. It describes the etymology of various British place names. In future you will be able to search for place names that have a particular suffix or that have a particular element in them. There are other fun features that it could have too – like rendering a map of Britain using the names that places had in a given century. It only contains a few entries so far, but I will add to that over time.

This is a very fun project to do. I have liked etymology for a long time – I can’t remember when it was that I started looking things up on etymonline.com several times a day – probably about seven or eight years ago – but it has been a fascination of mine for a long time. Place names is an area of etymology that is somewhat lacking online – it’s fun being able to create something new that’s useful.