Using Google My Maps to Collect Vernacular Toponyms

The collection of vernacular toponyms often requires gathering data directly from the voice of speakers who live in the territory being investigated. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, reminds us that fieldwork can become unfeasible under certain circumstances. The pandemic provided an opportunity to reflect on remote collection possibilities: this is how a project regarding the vernacular urban toponymy of an Italian town (Savigliano, Piedmont) became a case study in experimenting with new methods to gather toponymic data. Some features of the well-known web mapping service Google Maps provide an ideal set of useful tools for this purpose, and many are already employed in various scholarly works regarding different branches of knowledge. The specific feature explored in our case study is Google My Maps, an application that allows people to complete a map themselves by drawing areas and naming them with their corresponding place names. Each person that creates a map and shares it with the researcher (without meeting in person) becomes an informant. The experiment highlights some of the method’s strengths (no interpersonal contact; time and cost savings; no collector’s influence; easiness to export, store and analyse toponyms with IT tools). There are of course some weaknesses too (unbalanced sample, lack of oral communication, criticality when writing dialect forms, no contact between the researcher and the landscape). However, Google My Maps proves to be an excellent resource in supporting remote collection of toponyms, and it deserves to be considered not only during the pandemic emergency.