ISHI at Linked Pasts Symposium 11

On December 9, 2025, members of the ISHI and World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) teams led a session at Linked Pasts Symposium 11: “Linking Knowledge Through Place: ISHI, WHG, and the Future of Gazetteer Collaboration.” The Linked Pasts Symposium is a goal-oriented forum focused on building, planning, and learning about the application of linked open data (LOD) to historical texts, events, and datasets.

During the event, Ruth Mostern, ISHI Director and WHG Project Director, introduced ISHI and its new role in the Pelagios Place Activity (formerly the Gazetteer Alignment Activity). Stephen Gadd, WHG Technical Director, presented recent updates to the World Historical Gazetteer, including ORCID-based authentication, new Entity and Reconciliation Service APIs, and improved reconciliation with Wikidata. Ali Straub and Palak Vashist then discussed new and improved contributor documentation, including a more user-friendly LP-TSV template and a Submission Readiness Checklist that outlines the steps and criteria required to successfully publish a dataset on the WHG.

After the presentations, an open discussion addressed challenges in modeling historical places from uncertain data, WHG’s plans for a graph data model in its next version, its curation strategy and current content gaps, and opportunities for partnerships and capacity building. Participants also expressed strong interest in developing a centralized portal or clearinghouse for syllabi, courses, and training materials related to spatial history and gazetteers.

View the session agenda and discussion summary here. 

WHG Transitions to ORCiD Authentication

The World Historical Gazetteer will now require authentication via ORCiD (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) for all registered users. The use of ORCID will ensure accurate attribution, persistent researcher identity, interoperability, and scholarly credit, while also maintaining accessibility beyond institutional affiliations, within the linked open data ecosystem. Using ORCiD also streamlines account access by removing the need to manage passwords or depend on third-party login services. Users with existing ORCiD accounts can sign in seamlessly and securely. We’ve adopted ORCiD so that users can benefit from a more secure, flexible, and research-friendly system. 

The use of ORCiD will also enable secure and controlled access to the WHG’s APIs, including two new complementary APIs for use with WHG data. The Entity API will allow users to retrieve full metadata, names, types, geometries, temporal bounds, authority info, and linked resources from among datasets, collections, and over 2.2 million places. The Reconciliation Service API will allow users to match historical geographical entities with the WHG data in both automated workflows and manual tools such as OpenRefine.

Our transition to ORCID authentication was made possible thanks to a collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS).

What This Means for Users 

  • Existing WHG users can link their WHG account with an ORCiD by using the Legacy WHG Login and Link ORCiD button on whgazetteer.org/accounts/login/.
  • If you are a new user who already has an ORCiD, you can simply log in using your existing ORCid credentials.
  • If you are a new user who does not have an ORCiD, you can create one during sign-in on whgazetteer.org/accounts/login/.
  • Registration is NOT required to search WHG’s indexes or to view datasets or collections. Registration is required only for dataset contribution, the creation of collections, or use of our APIs. With your consent, it would also allow us to let you know about important updates and new features.

A Message about WHG Technical Director Karl Grossner’s Retirement

After more than seven years of dedicated work on the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG), Technical Director and Lead Developer Dr. Karl Grossner has announced his retirement from the project team. Karl has been instrumental in all aspects of envisioning, guiding, and building the WHG into groundbreaking digital infrastructure that includes a spatially and temporally referenced index of world historical place names and a linked data ecosystem. Karl has led the development of the platform through three versions, the most recent of which indexes over 3.4 million place names. 

Karl’s contributions have gone far beyond technical expertise. He has taken a leading role in setting the vision for the project, building a collaborative and robust community of scholars who work with linked open geodata, and soliciting and developing the content that we index. His dedication, expertise, and commitment have been fundamental to the project’s success and evolution. We are grateful that Karl remains committed to the success of the WHG and that he will continue contributing actively to it in his retirement. You can keep up with Karl’s continued work on his X account: @kgeographer. We’ve posted a statement from Karl on the WHG blog here : http://blog.whgazetteer.org/2024/07/26/a/

Karl’s accomplishments ensure that the WHG has a bright future. We will continue improving the platform, growing the community, and expanding the index of named places. We are pleased to announce that Dr. Stephen Gadd, a scholar of early modern economic history, has transitioned into the role of lead developer. Stephen has worked closely with Karl over the past year and shares a passion for the WHG and the linked open data community. In the coming months, Stephen and the project team will continue enhancing and extending the platform’s features including the API and the reconciliation process, accessioning historical place datasets, and building our community.

We hope that you will stay in touch during this transition and that you will join us in expressing gratitude and esteem to Karl and sharing good wishes for his future. Please use the contact form under About on whgazetter.org  to contact the project team. 

Ruth Mostern, Principal Investigator and Project Director

Stephen Gadd, Lead Developer

Alexandra Straub, Project Manager

A message from Dr. Karl Grossner on his retirement

Dear WHG community,

With more than a little regret and some relief, I have withdrawn from my roles as Technical Director and Lead Developer on the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) project team after 7 ½ years, and will depart the team entirely at the end of 2024. As of now, the technical lead on WHG is the estimable Stephen Gadd (@docuracy). The rest of the team is unchanged. The project is in good hands, led as always by Dr. Ruth Mostern, and the prospects for continued development as an increasingly important resource in DH software infrastructure are great.

It was my good fortune in 2016 to be asked by Ruth and Dr. Patrick Manning to help write an NEH grant to initiate the WHG project, and to serve as its Technical Director should the grant be awarded. And it was my further good fortune to work with great teammates in bringing the platform along through versions 1 and 2 to version 3, released in June 2024. The initial “proof of concept” led to a second significant NEH grant and support from abroad and from several internal groups at Pitt.

When I left Stanford Libraries in 2016 it was intended to be a ‘semi-retirement’! Well, that was obviously deferred, but now is the time to turn away from software development and focus more on my (always applied) research agenda, “computing place.” 

I will be an active data contributor going forward, and may even make an occasional small pull request, but only as one of a hopefully growing number of contributing developers; it is an open-source project! I’m not vanishing, just stepping aside.

With all best wishes to the team, and to all the people I’ve met along this journey…

Karl

Adding GeoNames to Wikidata for reconciliation

In the upcoming Version 3 beta of World Historical Gazetteer (early June 2024), we have added about 10 million GeoNames place records to the 3.6 million Wikidata records in the index we have been using for reconciliation. This means that for geocoding purposes (one of the main reasons for using the WHG reconciliation service) the will be a higher likelihood of finding prospective matches for your records.

It also adds some complexity to the review of hits (see the screen below) and we are looking for feedback on how this will work. During the beta phase we can refine or even discard this feature – up to our users!

So…how it will work:

  • When you create a new reconciliation task you have the option to exclude GeoNames records; if you do, they will be skipped in the search for matches
  • If you don’t exclude them, hits from GeoNames will be returned along with those from Wikidata, but…
    • If there were were both Wikidata and GeoNames hits, the GeoNames ones would be hidden initially, but displayed on click of a toggle button
    • If there were no Wikidata hits but there were GeoNames hits, those would display right away.
  • As usual, you can select zero or more of these hits as close matches, press Save and move on to the next.

Below you can see the before and after choosing to display GeoNames hits.

Wikidata hit shown, GeoNames hidden until requested
GeoNames hits displayed on request

Version 3 due in June!

We have been busy, with both software and content development. Version 3 of the World Historical Gazetteer has been in development since February 2023, and a beta version will be available mid-2024. What follows is a brief outline of what we have been working on, much of which came as suggestions from our user community. Details will follow in the coming weeks and months, on this blog and on Twitter. We do expect to establish a Mastodon account soon as well.

Version 3 (alpha) home page

New “Gazetteer Builder” feature

  • Link multiple datasets in a single collection, e.g. for a group or individual to assemble a “Historical Gazetteer of {x}”
  • Merge multiple datasets into new dataset

Home page

  • A map(!), with search and advanced search
  • ‘Carousels’ of published datasets and collections, with extents previewed on the map
  • Improved explanation of what the WHG offers
  • News and announcements

Maps

  • All 14 maps on the site significantly upgraded
  • Most maps now have temporal controls: a timespan ‘slider’ and/or a sequence ‘player’
  • Faster display of large datasets and collections, thanks to WHG’s own new “tileboss” server

Search

  • Search now across all published records-the confusing “search the index or database” choice is gone!
  • Options for ‘starts with”, “contains”, “similar to” (aka fuzzy) as well as ‘exact’
  • Spatial filter on search results
  • More information returned in search result items

Place Portal pages

  • Complete makeover of its design
  • Physical geographic context: ecoregions, watersheds, rivers, boundaries
  • Nearby places
  • Preview of annotated collections that include the place

Publication and editorial workflow

  • We are now especially highlighting three types of publications: Datasets, annotated Place Collections, and Dataset Collections
  • Expanded Managing Editor role
  • Improved tracking of contributors and data, from ‘interested’ to full accessioning
  • DOIs for data publications, enhanced metadata, significantly enhanced presentation pages
  • Improved download options

Annotated place collections for teaching

  • Support for class and workshop group scenarios
  • Optional image per annotation
  • Order places sequentially with or without dates
  • Enhanced display and temporal control options
  • Optional gallery per class
  • Site-wide student gallery

“My Data” dashboard and profile

  • Single page, simpler

Study Areas

  • Discontiguous areas, e.g. Iberian peninsula and S. America as a single area

API and data dumps

  • More endpoints, better documented
  • Regular dumps of published data in multiple formats

Codebase

  • Improved file upload validation and error reporting
  • The codebase is now “dockerized,” making it much easier to contribute to the platform’s development
  • Upgraded versions of all major components: Django, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, etc.
  • All map-related functions refactored for efficiency

Community Feedback Meetings: September 2023

As the project team continues developing the WHG platform and expanding indexed and published content about historical places, we want to ensure that we are maximizing opportunities to involve our community in decision making and feedback. To that end, the WHG project team will be holding a series of community feedback meetings. We have scheduled four 60-minute Zoom meetings in September of 2023 during which we hope to solicit feedback from those interested in and knowledgeable about the WHG project and also humanistic linked data more broadly. We seek your help in identifying and prioritizing next steps in making the WHG platform more useful and more usable for more people.

The four meetings will take place on Thursday, September 7 at 9:00AM and 4:00PM Eastern and Friday, September 8 at 9:00AM and 4:00PM Eastern. You can register for a meeting using the Zoom links below. 

September 7, 2023 9:00-10:00 am EST

September 7, 2023 4:00-5:00 pm EST 

September 8, 2023 9:00-10:00 am EST

September 8, 2023 4:00-5:00 pm EST 

The agenda will be the same for all sessions: a welcome and introduction, a brief overview of project developments over the past year, a walkthrough of new developments for the upcoming Version 3, and time for questions and discussion. We can be most productive if participants visit WHG beforehand (https://whgazetteer.org), register as a user if you haven’t already, and browse the site guide, tutorials, and features themselves. Prior to the meeting, you will receive a Google Survey form that you can use to record comments and thoughts during and after the meeting. 

Job Opportunity: Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital World History (Pitt World History Center)

Please share this call with anyone in your networks who may be interested!

The World History Center and the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh seek applicants for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Digital World History beginning Fall 2023. Candidates must have completed a Ph.D. in history or a related discipline before June 2023. 

We seek candidates who have a background in history or a related discipline and who also have expertise in one or more digital methodologies, including data development, scripting languages, and linked data. Experience working in the spatial humanities with tools such as QGIS and ArcGIS is required. Applicants from information science who have demonstrable expertise in history are also welcome to apply. The successful candidate should also have experience in digital humanities pedagogy and teaching. 

In addition to engaging in their own research, the postdoctoral fellow will collaborate on the Center Director’s current research initiatives, including the NEH-funded World Historical Gazetteer. The successful candidate will supervise 1-2 student workers and oversee the transformation of data into Linked Places format. Experience working with data using relational databases, scripting languages such as Python or R, and SQL is highly desirable. Experience developing web maps is also desirable.

The Fellow will serve as the student supervisor and lead instructor for the Digital Atlas Design Internship (https://www.worldhistory.pitt.edu/education/digital-atlas-design-internship). This will require regular meetings with students and faculty advisors. The Fellow is also expected to advise faculty and graduate students about digital methodologies and tools, consult with the system administrators who support the Center’s servers, and participate actively in the Center’s activities, events, and intellectual community.  

Salary and benefits are competitive. Please apply on Pitt Talent Center by uploading a letter of application and a full CV. We will request letters of reference and a writing sample from semi-finalist candidates. The deadline for applications is March 20, 2023.  

WHG Awarded NEH/IMLS Digital Humanities Advancement Grant!

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced that the World Historical Gazetteer Project has been awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG), co-funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

The grant will allow the project team to develop infrastructure, content, and community for Version 3 of the WHG. The  index will more than double in size; the suite of tools will evolve to better support teachers, contributors, and end users; and the team will expand opportunities to involve diverse and global communities of board members, scholars, learners and developers.  

The NEH’s Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG) supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. In support of its efforts to advance national information infrastructures in libraries and archives, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) provides funding through this program. 

ABOUT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

Connecting Places with World Historical Gazetteer

On 13 September, I gave an invited talk, titled “Connecting Places with World Historical Gazetteer” at the Royal Dutch Academies Humanities Cluster offices in Amsterdam (KNAW-HuC). The slides are provided here, with some annotation.

KNAW_slides_annotated_Sep2022Download