The World Historical Gazetteer hosted an exhibitor table at this year’s American Historical Association annual conference, from January 8–11, 2026, in Chicago. ISHI’s Ruth Mostern, Palak Vashist, and Ali Straub met with a range of scholars, educators, and students to discuss how they might use the WHG in their own research and teaching.
The WHG was also featured in an AHA Undergraduate Poster Session by New College of Florida undergraduate student Sunjay Hopkins. Sunjay’s thesis project connects the place names in Gregorio Dati’s La Sfera (The Globe) to the World Historical Gazetteer’s repository via principles of Linked Open Data. Sunjay’s project draws on over a hundred maps from individual manuscript copies of La Sfera to create a digital gazetteer of place names and variants. Linking the Sfera Project gazetteer with the World Historical Gazetteer creates a two-way network that lets users trace places mentioned in Dati's work across texts, periods, and projects, enriching both resources through shared, open historical data. Read more about Sunjay's thesis here!
ISHI Associates Palak Vashist and Ali Straub at the WHG table in the exhibitor hall.
Sunjay Hopkins (New College of Florida) presenting his poster "Maps, Links, and the Globe: Using Linked Open Data to Improve Functionality in the Digital Humanities"