Data
In our project, we drew on a wide range of both academic and official sources to ensure credibility, analytical depth, and historical perspective in our study of street renaming in Riga from 1990 to 2025.
We used:
Academic articles and monographs on street naming policies, urban memory, cultural identity, and toponymy in post-Soviet countries. These include Laimute Balode’s work on the Latvian context, Monika Palmberger’s research on Bosnia and Herzegovina, and comparative analyses of street renaming in East Germany and other parts of Europe.
Official open data provided by the State Land Service and the Riga Geoinformation System (GEO RĪGA) served as the basis for our dataset. These sources reflect real decisions by city authorities and allow us to track renaming over time.
Digital humanities projects such as Mapping Diversity provided us with a comparative perspective and methodological guidance when working with gender and cultural aspects of street names.
Conceptual resources such as A Guide to Spatial History helped structure our approach to spatio-temporal data analysis using digital humanities tools (e.g. QGIS).
Historical reference books, including Rīgas ielu, laukumu, parku un tiltu nosaukumu rādītājs (2001), allowed us to trace the evolution of street names into the digital age.
This bibliography forms the theoretical and empirical basis of our project, helping not only to collect and structure the data, but also to interpret it in a broader cultural and historical context.