Author: Ali Straub

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

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.

World Historical Gazetteer Featured in InfoEco Cookbook!

The WHG has been featured in the Information Ecosystems Cookbook, an Open Educational Resource (OER) supported by a Sawyer Seminar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and facilitated by the Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh. The InfoEco Cookbook is comprised of modules organized by curricular pathways: Data in Context, Datafication, Data Structures, Platform Studies, and Producing and Using Datasets.

In the WHG module, “GIS Data: Using Linked Open Data and the World Historical Gazetteer to Map Spatial Data,” users learn how to make a gazetteer and how to index it in the World Historical Gazetteer. The module has four main sections. A “do” section asks learners to create a geospatial dataset by offering step-by-step instructions. A “watch” section includes a video that demonstrates how to reconcile data against the WHG index. An “explore” section provides alternative GIS tools and datasets for learners to engage with. And finally, a “guiding realizations” section describes the overarching concepts and challenges of the module.

The module was designed with different ways to do the lesson. One option is to follow along with an active facilitator guiding learners through the sections. Alternatively, one can do the lesson individually and asynchronously. The WHG’s InfoEco Cookbook module is a great way for interested users to learn how to format, upload, and reconcile a dataset into the World Historical Gazetteer!

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

The University of Pittsburgh’s World History Center is seeking applicants for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Digital World History beginning Fall 2022. The postdoctoral fellow will collaborate closely with the World Historical Gazetteer team and should have expertise in one or more digital methodologies, including data development, scripting languages, and linked data. Please share this opportunity widely! See below for application information.

Proficiency in digital mapping and spatial analysis is particularly desirable. Applicants from information science who have demonstrable expertise in history are also welcome to apply. In addition to engaging in their own research, the successful candidate will collaborate on the Center Director’s current research initiatives, including the World Historical Gazetteer. The successful candidate should also have experience in digital humanities pedagogy and teaching.

The Fellow will serve as the student supervisor and lead instructor for the 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. Candidates must have completed their Ph.D. before June 2022. Please apply at the Pitt Talent Center by uploading a cover letter and a full CV.  We will request letters of references and a writing sample from semi-finalist candidates. Deadline for applications is March 20th, 2022. Please direct any questions to WHC@PITT.EDU