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World Historical Gazetteer

@whgazetteer.org

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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 #DH #LOD #DigitalHumanities #GIS #GIStory

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · Jul 5

🌍 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 · Jun 16

🧭 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 · Jun 11

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

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...

bit.ly

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Reposted by World Historical Gazetteer

Seán Thomas Kane @sthosdkane.bsky.social · May 21

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...

On Toponymy

This week, the first in several scribblings about my research: how I connect historic places in my sources with their modern names.

wednesdayblog.org

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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · May 20

We have an interactive map of Equiano's astonishing travels, compiled by @rmostern.bsky.social: whgazetteer.org/collections/...

Map showing locations visited by Olaudah Equiano between 1745 and 1797.

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World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · Apr 30

🌍 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 · Nov 13

... Just made some changes to our spatial API in the hope that it will only ever return JSON (even it it's only an error message) 🤞

Similar changes to other APIs will have to await a planned infrastructural upgrade.

World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org · Nov 11

📍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...

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...

github.com

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