World Historical Gazetteer: Toward a Digital Epistemology of Place

FAIN: HAA-290373-23

University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA 15260-6133)
Ruth Mostern (Project Director: June 2022 to present)

Expansion, development, and outreach of the World Historical Gazetteer, a comprehensive digital resource linking significant global place names over time used for researching and teaching world history.

This proposal is to develop infrastructure, content and sustainable governance for Version 3 of World Historical Gazetteer (WHG), a platform for linking knowledge about the past via place. WHG is a powerful tool for scholarly collaboration and crucial backend architecture for named entity recognition, digital mapping and library search. This grant will allow WHG to more than double in size and expand its multivalent and multilingual records; to perform enhancements to support teaching and dataset submission; to foster communities of board members, scholars, learners and developers; and to become financially sustainable. We aim to ensure widespread use, institute scholarly peer review and promote open-source development. WHG is the only digital humanities project developing tools, platforms, content, and community for the history of place at the global scale. It enhances and integrates other spatial history projects and fosters a humanistic approach to place beyond historical GIS.