World-Historical Gazetteer is a University of Pittsburgh World History Center project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project has a three-year term, ending in May 2020.

We are building build a Linked Open Data historical gazetteer of named and typed cultural and physical geographic places, by

• creating a global “spinal” gazetteer of some 30,000 significant named places. It will include not only polities, administrative districts, and significant settlements, but ethnonyms, language regions, named historical routes, and physical geographic features such as mountain ranges, rivers, watersheds, ecoregions (biomes), and ocean currents. It will focus significantly but not exclusively on the centuries since 1500, so as to dovetail with synergistic efforts devoted to the ancient and medieval world like Pelagios and the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places.
• linking that spine with contributed specialist gazetteer data in a union index, rich with links to associated place records and other data
• building a web interface to search, browse, visualize, and download contents of that index
• developing an application programming interface (API) to enable machine access to the entire dataset

Project Staff

Ruth Mostern (Principal Investigator and Director, World History Center)

Karl Grossner (Technical Director)

Ryan Horne (Postdoctoral Fellow, World History Center)

Patrick Manning (Project Consultant)

David Ruvolo (Project Manager)

Advisory Committee

Cliff Anderson (Vanderbilt University)

Robert Batchelor (Georgia Southern University)

Merrick Lex Berman, (Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University)

Jeremy Black (University of Exeter)

Christopher Chase-Dunn (University of California, Riverside)

Siddarth Chandra (Michigan State University)

Tom Elliot (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University)

Leif Isaksen (University of Exeter)

Krzysztof Janowicz (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Lewis Lancaster (University of California, Berkeley)

Jane Landers (Vanderbilt University)

Leo Lucassen (Leiden University)

Patrick Manning (University of Pittsburgh)

Adam Rabinowitz (University of Texas at Austin)

Patricia Seed (University of California-Irvine)

Ryan Shaw (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Rainer Simon (Austrian Institute of Technology)