A pillar of ISHI’s work is developing and maintaining infrastructure and standards to link and integrate information about historical geography. By building infrastructure and standards, ISHI enables new forms of analysis, comparison, and visualization across time and place, fostering collaboration and making historical geographic information more accessible, interoperable, and useful for scholarship and teaching
The flagship project of ISHI is the World Historical Gazetteer (whgazetteer.org), a key piece of infrastructure in digital spatial history. The World Historical Gazetteer is a platform for linking records about historical places, allowing people to make spatial connections across time and language. Learn more about the project here!
Beginning in fall 2025, ISHI assumed co-institutional stewardship, with the Pelagios Network, of the network’s Place Working Group. The Pelagios Place Working Group (formerly the Gazetteer Alignment Activity) focuses on building the infrastructure to link historical place information across independently maintained and heterogeneous gazetteers. By establishing standards, modeling place attestations, and supporting the alignment of individual places between datasets, it moves beyond isolated lists to create a connected ecosystem of historical geographic knowledge. On December 9, 2025, ISHI led a session at Linked Pasts Symposium 11 to discuss the Place Working Group and the future of gazetteer collaboration. Learn more about the event.