World Historical Gazetteer

How are AI & computational methods reshaping historical research? @rmostern.bsky.social will discuss how WHG uses computational methods for semantic clustering & AI tools to extract place information from texts @ the AI & History Conference! 🗓️ 10/15 at 11:30 AM ET 💻 Join online: bit.ly/4hXKmlP

Inspired by @sharonhoward.bsky.social's beautiful mapping of @thegozfather.bsky.social's catalogue of pleadings in the Court of Requests, we're building a new Workbench tool to help identify place names from the descriptions. worldhistoricalgazetteer.github.io/workbench-de...

Trying something new: feeding old print gazetteers through modern OCR + open LLMs + our newly-expanded index to see how much can be turned into searchable, mappable data. Read more at blog.whgazetteer.org?p=434 Play with it: worldhistoricalgazetteer.github.io/gazetteer-of...

Want to map your dataset like this? Our free Reconciliation API matches your place-names phonetically against over 67 million historical & modern toponyms from GeoNames, Wikidata, Pleiades, Getty TGN & more, and returns coordinates. Works with OpenRefine too!📍 docs.whgazetteer.org/content/tech...

🌍 Ports are now (optionally) shown on the eRutter to help with route picking. 🤔 They're currently fetched from @wikidatacommunity.bsky.social, but this would be a great use case for a @whgazetteer.org temporal API to filter out modern ports and highlight ancient ones.

🧭 Building a lightweight sea-routing graph for historical GIS & DH use cases beyond simple port-to-port hops. Edges are weighted for ~5km coastal preference. Aiming for serverless exploration of connectivity in historical maritime trade. ⚓️ #MaritimeHistory #HistoricalGIS #DigitalHumanities

Want to work with the WHG team? The Institute for Spatial History Innovation @ Pitt is hiring a full-time Research Associate to be the Digital Data Specialist & Managing Editor of World Historical Gazetteer! Learn more & apply by July 11: bit.ly/4kAknki @rmostern.bsky.social @docuracy.co.uk

This week on my blog I wrote about my methodology in discerning modern placenames from the 16th century counterparts in Thevet’s “Singularitez.” Part of the translation I’m preparing for publication. #earlymodern #frhistory wednesdayblog.org/2025/05/21/o...

🌍 Recent updates to the WHG user interface give faster loading and globe visualisations. Image: Indigenous Place Names in North America, a WHG Place Collection at doi.org/10.60681/whg... Explore more at: whgazetteer.org ! #DigitalHumanities #HistoricalGIS #GeoHumanities #HistoricalGeography

📍What's the Point? Usually (on our maps) a proxy for a place, but we could be more precise, with ... approximation! Might points have a ‘tolerance’ circle? Should polygons show when they contain something more vague? #LinkedPlaces #SpatialData #HistGIS #LinkedPasts github.com/WorldHistori...