Street Name Data as a Reflection of Migration and Settlement History

Abstract

Street names (odonyms) play an important role not only as descriptors of geographic locations but also due to their sociological and political connotations and commemorative character. Here we analyse street names in Europe and North America extracted from OpenStreetMap, asking in particular to what extent odonyms reflect early European settlements in the New World, i.e., the immigration of German, Austrian and Scandinavian minorities. We observe that old street names of European origin can predominantly be found in rural areas. North American street names indeed recapitulate local and regional settlement histories. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that easily accessible data sets from freely available map data such as street names convey usable information concerning migration patterns and the history of settlements in the case of European immigrants in North America as well as colonial history. We provide a freely available pipeline to analyse this kind of data.