ISHI is dedicated to promoting digital justice and reparation in the spatial history domain, meaning it actively works to address historical inequities in the creation, representation, and accessibility of spatial data. This includes ensuring that digital maps, datasets, and research practices fairly represent historically marginalized communities, recognizing and correcting past biases, and making historical geographic information accessible, ethical, and accountable. In practice, this can involve promoting inclusive data collection, collaborating with underrepresented communities, and critically examining how historical narratives are spatially recorded and disseminated.
As of Fall 2025, ISHI is developing an application for a working group with Responsible Data Science@Pitt (RDS) to explore the responsible use of historical spatial data. From a digital justice and responsible data science point of view, there have been few systematic efforts to explore the issues and to develop standards and best practices for handling sensitive, offensive, or colonizing data, or regarding the modeling of memories about place and space by local, descendant, and resistant communities. This working group aims to interrogate existing best practices and tackle continuing ethical and practical challenges that pertain to the responsible development and use of global historical data, particularly as it pertains to information about spatial history.
In May 2025, with support from a Pitt University Center for International Studies Hewlett Grant, the Institute for Spatial History Innovation and the Pitt Center for Latin American Studies held a two-day workshop at the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on the topic of ethics and justice in digital history titled "Workshop Ética e Justiça nas Humanidades Digitais." Twenty-three Brazilian experts, working at the intersection of spatial history, digital history, and digital ethics, attended the workshop along with ISHI Director Ruth Mostern and Associate Director Alexandra Straub and (via Zoom) World Historical Gazetteer Technical Director Stephen Gadd. Meeting sessions explored best practices and continuing challenges pertaining to the development of open source and linked data software for modeling, publishing, and exploring memories of historical injustice. Presenters highlighted the importance of including community voices in the creation of projects about memory, contextualizing data that may have historically been obtained through extractive practices, and how to use linked historical data to expand ideas about authority to speak about the human past. Read more here.