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World Historical Gazetteer

@whgazetteer.org
192 followers 6 following 10 posts

WHG is a platform for linking records about historical places, allowing people to make spatial connections across time and language. Project Director: @rmostern.bsky.social Technical Director: @docuracy.co.uk whgazetteer.org #DH #LOD #GIS

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Reposted by World Historical Gazetteer
kgeographer 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 🇦🇱 @kgeographer.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
🧵 The Environmental Dimensions of Place Service (EDOPS) v0.4 is live: edops.computingplace.org Give it a place (settlement, historical polity) & get a structured "environmental signature" of the drainage basin(s) it occupies: hydrology, climate, terrain, etc. + climate & land use over time 1/3
Home page of the Environmental Dimensions of Place Service (EDOPS), with links to its 3 principal pages, Sandbox, Workbench, Data Explorer
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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · 28/08/2026
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...
Heatmap of England and Wales showing the density of places identified (or misidentified) from the TNA descriptions of its Elizabethan-period pleadings in the Court of Requests.Map popup showing detail of a case relating to Spon Street, Coventry, and a link to the record in the TNA online catalogue.
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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · 01/06/2026
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...
Global heatmap of the roughly 116,000 places extracted from A Gazetteer of the World (1856), plotted on a world basemap. Density is highest across Britain and Europe, South Asia, and the eastern United States; sparser across much of Africa, South America, and the interior of Asia, reflecting the 1856 compilers' Anglocentric reach.
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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · 22/05/2026
🕵️We're transcribing and geocoding all 7 volumes of "A Gazetteer of the World" (1856), a monumental work edited anonymously by "a Member of the Royal Geographical Society" @rgs.org - can anyone suggest who that might have been, and why they might not have been named? archive.org/details/agaz...
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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · 20/05/2026
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...
docs.whgazetteer.org
2. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) - Documentation for World Historical Gazetteer
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Reposted by World Historical Gazetteer
Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 05/07/2025
🌍 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.
At low zoom levels, cluster markers indicate the locations of ports.At higher zoom levels, each port gets its own marker, coloured by category.
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Reposted by World Historical Gazetteer
Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 16/06/2025
🧭 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
Diagram of historical sea routing graph for Europe.Diagram of historical sea routing graph for Europe, showing (in red) weighted edges in the zone favoured for coastal sailing (~5km).
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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · 11/06/2025
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
bit.ly
Job Opportunity - Research Associate at Institute for Spatial History Innovation | World History Center | University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Spatial History Innovation (ISHI) is currently accepting applications for a full-time Research Associate to act as the Digital Data Specialist. The selecte...
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Reposted by World Historical Gazetteer
Seán Thomas Kane @sthosdkane.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
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...
wednesdayblog.org
On Toponymy
This week, the first in several scribblings about my research: how I connect historic places in my sources with their modern names.
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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · 30/04/2025
🌍 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
Globe visualisation of Indigenous Place Names in North America, a WHG Place Collection [https://doi.org/10.60681/whg-collection-172]
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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · 11/11/2024
📍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...
github.com
Geometry Approximation in LPF · Issue #411 · WorldHistoricalGazetteer/whg3
Proposal for Geometry Approximation Extension to Linked Places Format We propose introducing a new (optional) approximation property in the geometry object to reflect the intended precision of geom...
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