Connecting the World through Geography, Thought and Culture: The World Historical Gazetteer
Ruth Mostern, professor of history and director of Pitt’s World History Center, spearheads the ambitious digital World Historical Gazetteer (WHG). Begun with a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2017, the award-winning WHG creates content, standards and the digital infrastructure for an index of world historical place names within a network of linked data and user tools to support collaborative research on a global scale—research focusing on cross-regional exchanges, connections and comparisons.
“The system assists quantitative and empirical historical research,” says Mostern. “The gazetteer is a two-way platform for scholarly communication that improves people’s own research while researchers also contribute to a growing shared resource.” Researchers can upload data sets of place records drawn from historical sources and share data while augmenting their own data and discovering other work being done concerning their own places of interest.
The gazetteer includes a timeline of every recorded reference to a place in the database. For example, the record for Bosnia displays a dense plateau of references in the years surrounding World War I. References spike again in the 1990s, when Bosnia was a battleground in Yugoslavia’s civil wars.
Mostern is grateful for the ways that Pitt provides technical resources for humanities and social science researchers without large grants and labs. “The WHG project is impossible without that support. We only use a small amount of computing resources, but with that computing, we can collaborate in creating new historical knowledge. Without that support, our platform would not exist.”
whgazetteer.org/
“The gazetteer is a two-way platform for scholarly communication that improves people’s own research while researchers also contribute to a growing shared resource.”